Yeah, one interesting thing about Autonomous is that although I was generally concerned about everyone’s predicaments, the bots ended up being the only ones whom I felt invested in as people. I don’t know whether that was deliberate or not, but in any case Paladin’s exploration of gender identity is definitely a high point.
I’m still processing Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Overall I certainly enjoyed it; the worldbuilding was imaginative, the body horror appropriately creepy, and I thought the Alexios and Jake stories were particularly interesting character studies. But the storylines, while engaging, mostly felt pretty formulaic.
Slightly off-topic, but nonetheless interesting: Today I heard a radio feature about the “Museum of Malware”. They said, in the early days, the 80s and 90s, Virus were more of an art form to use computers in a non-conformant way, to make jokes, to stretch the boundaries of what is possible with virusses. Today, the reporter said, using a virus is totally a monetary thing. Yeah, Crims are better these days than Anarchs or Shapers https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum
About Solar Punk: The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures consists of 4 shortstories each accompanied by essays about the technologies and societal mechanisms featured in these stories. The stories themselves are categorized into urban and rural, big and small. A great concept to highlight the issues and themes we are facing with climate change in the 21st century. Here’s a HTML-Version you can read online.
Not really literature, but an NBN associate told me to share this link to a russian startup that will have CubeSats in space as orbital billboards: https://startrocket.me
Stratosphere advertisements for Diesel™, yay!
Is it possible for someone to consolidate all the suggestions made into a master post, so that we can quickly see what have been suggested and go down the list if we want?
Should be open to edit, comment, and all that other stuff. I haven’t scrolled all the way up this forum page, but here’s the last few recommendations from myself and others.
So I stepped away from cyber recently to read American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett. It was good until it kinda wasn’t. I LOVED the concept of this story…Idyllic Perfect Town with Dark Secret and how it mixes a variety of genres (horror and science fiction), but the “big reveals” and execution of the conflict felt a bit off to me. I dunno.
Currently I’m reading The Shadow of the Wind which has some of the best writing I’ve read in a long time. It’s got some flavorful Oscar Wilde-esque phrasing coupled with a neat story about a boy who discovers a rare book in a secret library. Even with how little of it I’ve read, I’m ready to recommend.
After that I think it’s time to head back to the future (dystopian and/or otherwise). Anyone reading anything new right now worth putting on my “to read” list?
Some of the news and philosophy writings at the moment are very netrunner. Going down the philosophy route of that are homo sapiens and homo deus by noah yuval harari (probably spelt his name wrong) and the episode of the Joe rogan podcast with elon musk.
Comics, anyone? ICv2 tells that “Asmodee Entertainment has licensed Dark Horse Comics to produce art books based on Asmodee tabletop game properties, Asmodee announced. The first three books under the agreement will all feature intellectual properties from the Fantasy Flight Games studio, Android Universe, Arkham Horror, and Keyforge, leading off with an initial release in Q4 2020 or Q1 2021.”
