#JustFinished Where Peace Is Lost by Valerie Valdes.
Very different from her series starting with Chilling Effect, Where Peace Is Lost is much more serious. It reads as a quest to save a world, a journey or personal forgiveness, romance, and anti-capitalist philosophy. That's a lot to cram into 12 hours. It's all well done though, not seeming patchwork at all. Thus I zoomed through the story in two days.
Valdes delivers a solid book, perhaps leading us to "the further adventure of..."
Rebeccsa Mozo, the narrator, had a handful of mispronouciations that should have been caught by someone. Not enough to be ruinous, but distracting nonetheless. ☹️ Pronouncing buffet as the noun form, for instance, when it was used as the verb form.
@DejahEntendu@bookstodon I loved Where Peace Is Lost by Valerie Valdes. I've read her previous #books and they're enjoyable but for me not as gripping as Peace Lost. I very much hope for sequels!
Alien was released in 1979. It is hard to believe that film was made 45 years ago. Some plot details in the movie are still so relevant today. The sci-fi styling, visual aesthetics and music also really hold up.
Interior illustrations from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PICTURE ATLAS OF OUR UNIVERSE by Roy A. Gallant. This particular section was a whimsical "what if" look at possible alien life in the solar system.
@cpkimber
Thanks - in truth, I had no idea about Jameson.
Robinson may himself be no engineer, but he definitely seems to have done some thorough research and curating (or so I think, being a layperson in this discipline myself). @boeken@bookstodon
@fifischwarz@cpkimber@boeken@bookstodon Absolutely. His Mars trilogy may not be as popular as the Martian, but I don’t think that’s because it is less “hard” as a sci fi novel.
#JustFinished Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice.
Rice weaves a gorgeous follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow. About 12 years have passed since the power went out, and the Anishinaabe in what was the northern Ontario province are in need of a new home as local resources are dwindling. Moon of the Turning Leaves follows a group south and east as they search for a better place, preferably in their ancestral lands.
Along the way, they learn more of their world, both past and present. I felt that the characters learning they were big fish in a little pond was a nice touch, as many times lead characters are practically infallible.
Rice's prose is lyric, and his characters are rounded out. As soon as I saw he'd written another book in this world, I knew I had to read it. Billy Merasty, the narrator, adds to the immersion of the story.
Reading a simple sci-fi space opera, humans against space spiders, mindless fun, and then ...
The protagonist's spaceship has to rendezvous with a space station orbiting Mercury. Fair enough. The narrator talks about how the station has to stay in the planet's shadow. OK, that makes sense. Summer's a bitch that close to good old Sol.
They then go on to say that Mercury is tidally-locked to the Sun. ARGH!
It's not. It's rotation period is ⅔ of it's orbit period (88 days), meaning the planet slowly turns to toast it's whole surface. That's been known since the 1960's. Frown.
Then, more egregiously, states that the station orbits at around 1,000 km from the planet's surface. WTAF?
A geostationary orbit for Mercury (needed to stay in shadow) given it's mass and rotation period, would be 240,420 km from the surface. Angry grimace.
@chris Oh, one time, I think in Universe three or four, I had this weird recurring problem at one of my outposts where the robots decided they all wanted to live inside the hab instead of stay outside in the hellscape performing their assigned tasks. I’d destroy the robots and replace them, but it kept happening. Now those robots tried to space me on purpose. They full out pushed me into the airlock, blocked me in it, and then cycled the outer. I suppose that’s the point in my playthrough I decided to never take off my spacesuit ever again.
@chris Fingers crossed. Dealing with NPC pathfinding to-date has been a real headache. I read that the new update will be live on consoles May 15th, so less than a week to go. I may even put the game aside until then.
Intriguing analysis of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and its central flaw.
From M. Keith Booker’s Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (2001) #scifi#sciencefiction#Marxism#history
Actually, the "virtual voice" technology is not AI. It's the same sort of text-to-speech system that's existed for decades, just in a more refined form. A considerable amount of time (money) and (human) effort was still required to make hundreds of subtle adjustments too how it reads that particular book, which would be worthless and inapplicable to any other. At the end of the day, it's a tool, used by a human, like a word processor, pagination software, or any sort of audio/video editor. Moreover, if I hadn't used the tool, I would have simply done the narration myself, as I did for the audiobook of my first novel, so the only person who might have potentially lost a job to it was me. 🙂