Brad_Brace
Damn this makes me feel old. I’m from before phones had OS.
This one gets recommended a lot whenever people ask for science fiction recommendations. But just in case you haven’t heard of it, Peter Watts’ Blindsight. It’s pretty hard sci-fi, the writer assumes you’ll do a lot of the work so he doesn’t spoon feed you anything. It has some of the coolest aliens I’ve read about, both in physical appearance and in their minds. This one has a sort of sequel, Echopraxia, which is even more out there. Happens in the same setting and follows some of the events from Blindsight, but the core theme is very different. Where Blindsight is about sentience and the human mind, Echopraxia is about reality itself (which I didn’t find out until I read the author’s blog, because Echopraxia is even more difficult than Blindsight).
On easier reads, Skullcrack City by Jeremy Robert Johnson. This one is more on the Weird side of things. The concepts are not that new, but Johnson executes them very well. Weird science and human experiments.
You surely know about Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. But he has older books which are pretty good. My favorite is Finch, the conclusion to the Ambergris trilogy, which starts with City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: And Afterword. Of the three, I consider only Finch to land on Science Fiction. All three books are about the city of Ambergris in a vaguely defined world, were humans coexist with another people called the Grey Caps. City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of several stories and a novella, Shriek: An Afterword is supposed to be a book written in-universe, expanding on one of the entries from City of Saints and Madmen, and the two are closer to Fantasy and Magical Realism. Finch happens later, after some big events, and is mostly noir, but very unusual on several of it’s concepts, and by the end it’s entirely sci-fi. Think Cronenberg if he was more into fungi than flesh (actually I think there was a fungi pink subgenre going around years ago, and either this trilogy was foundational to that, or some of it’s more important books).
I guess I’m still in the denial phase. I haven’t technically left reddit yet. I guess during the blackout, then I’ll really know how I feel without it. I’ll definitely have to leave once RIF stops working.
I’m just having a really hard time getting used to kbin and Lemmy.
I guess I’m still in the denial phase. I haven’t technically left reddit yet. I guess during the blackout, then I’ll really know how I feel without it. I’ll definitely have to leave once RIF stops working.
I’m just having a really hard time getting used to kbin and Lemmy.
Okay, so I’m getting that you can follow all of lemmy through kbin, but can you follow all of kbin through lemmy? Because I get the feeling there’s magazines you can only subscribe to through kbin.
What I’m getting is that kbin is like a special entrance to, I guess, the feediverse, with some extra “rooms” on it’s side of things.
Okay. But if I follow that “The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance” link, on a… magazine(?) I’m subscribed to on kbin, and end up on lemmy, it still says there that I am not subscribed nor loged in. And to comment from there I still need to log in from my lemmy.world account. So at least subscriptions are their own separate thing on lemmy and on kbin, right? Earlier for instance, I was trying to subscribe to The Scary Door magazine, but from lemmy, and I couldn’t find how to do it. From the kbin account I could follow it easier.
I guess I’ll just stick with the kbin one since things look simpler.
It’s turning out confusing. Like I created an account on lemmy.world. Then I saw kbin existed and came over here… or went over there? And created a new account, with the same name. But now I’m seeing that the stuff I comment here… there… on kbin anyway, show up also on lemmy, so now apparently I have two accounts for the same stuff? Except I didn’t saw a way from lemmy to log in on kbin with the account from over there. If that’s even something that can be done. Kbin looks friendlier. Actually… am I writing this on kbin or on lemmy… what the fuck is going on? Where the hell am I?
Another vote for Terry Pratchett. I also find myself coming back to The Autumn of the Patriarch and A Hundred Years of Solitude over and over. They are not my favorite books, but they are sort of a habit, they’re definitely the ones I’ve re-read the most.