Sci-Fi

**Typical Action Movie Book ** Picking up a popular scifi book is a roll of the dice. Sometimes, through pure luck you find exceptional ideas or a riveting plot. Often, you’ll find a commentary on our modern civilization through examination of a different perspective. Yet the other half, you roll mediocre, and get white male boomer wish-fulfillment instead. Consider Phlebas is in the latter category. I’m the target audience, so don’t mind reading a space-adventure. Nothing was egregious enough to set this book down and go back to reading about the Vietnam War. But by the end, nothing stood out as anything more than a GPT4 remix of other scifi novels. ...

** Aliens should be weird. ** Interesting concepts of how a superior biotech race could manipulate and control humans, even while trying to maintain a respectful distance. With the right levers, a light touch can be powerfully convincing. More interesting is the way in which Butler focuses on human desires, as distinct from human emotion. The debilitating effects of social isolation, innate nausea, or deep desire to to believe in fictions all play important roles in the plot. ...

2.5 stars. Similar but not nearly as good as a fire upon the deep. The entire star fleet plot seemed useless. Still worked as a distraction for a few hours.

Snackable ‘misfits in space’ book with a more modern take on gender and sex but the rest of sci-fi tropes intact. I’ve just read this story one too many times to get too excited.

This is your dads sci-fi. Best read paired with forever war, links to enders game are clear. An only slightly post-fascist fascist work. Not painful like Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m glad I was exposed to Enders game and the movie first but how did this ever get made into a movie in the first place?

**Mathletes v. Machos ** I used to be good at math. Not ‘A student’ good, I mean win the competitions, calculate faster than friends with a calculator good. As part of a young math team, and as competitions progressed through 8 years of scholastic competition, I watched as the trajectories of the mathletes diverge. The girls drifted away from math team, and focused on areas outside of STEM. The boys prided themselves on calculus grades, picked up video games and code, and went straight into tech. ...

End of the World was Boring The fall of man was multidimensional. Ancestral primates fell out of the trees, then they fell from plant eating to meat eating then they fell from instinct into reason and thus into technology… Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment to an anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. Dystopia is the easiest form of societal criticism for mediocre writing. Take the flaws of a society, dial them up and add societal repercussions, and voila! You’ve created a dystopian world. Unfortunately this is like trying to build an airplane by scaling up a dragonfly 100x, without a nuanced understanding or at least thesis on the underlying causes of current societal ills it’s easy for a dystopia to feel cardboard. ...

** Space Sucks, Science is Fun ** Every science nerd dreams that someday their years of learning esoteric knowledge will pay off. So for many, the real world, void of advanced math and driven by relationships and perception, is a disappointment. Andy Weir’s niche is science-fantasy to fill this gap, a high budget MacGyver where the protagonist can ‘science the shit’ out of any situation. While Hail Mary makes no reference to the Martian, it is a continuation of the same premise. Wise-cracking science geek Ted Lasso finds himself alone in space with enough tools to try hypotheses and find creative solutions. In a separate substory, a competent bureaucracy races against the clock in order to make a last ditch effort to provide assistance from the safe confines of earth. This setup plays to Weir’s strengths: no worldbuilding, no relationships or character development, only science, plot, and wisecracks. ...

** Wonder in Incomprehension ** There was nothing in the laws of the universe that said Atevi had to have human attributes, or respond when humans tried to attach to them in human ways. * One of the great disappointments about western Scifi as a genre is its inability to imagine beings or cultures different than the western context bubble we live in. This makes Foreigner a breath of fresh air, one in which differences between beings are confusing, unsettling, and omnipresent. ...

** 46th book of 2021: On Wish-Fulfillment Station ** On Basilisk Station promises to take an exceedingly competent protagonist through harrowing circumstances and overwhelming odds to inevitable victory, and does just that. The prologue starts out revealing the dastardly plan of the nazis-in-space villains and the first few chapters show us that the protagonist’s civilization is essentially interwar England. Armed with little more than Chekov’s gun Honor has to save the day and prevent world war 2 a galactic war. ...