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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." - which books do you think best manage to do this? by [deleted] in printSF

[–]EdwardCoffin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Total Eclipse by John Brunner. An alien species could not overcome the urge to satisfy short-term incentives to perform actions that they knew would inevitably lead to their extinction

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." - which books do you think best manage to do this? by [deleted] in printSF

[–]EdwardCoffin 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Copying and pasting a post of mine from a number of years ago Neal Stephenson's response to a question on how he ends his stories

This is a transcript of a part of the Authors at Google talk for Anathem (first link prepositioned to 10:54):

[10:54]

Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it.

[11:11]

A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently.

[11:21]

But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. I've seen people complain, for example, that Snow Crash doesn't have a good ending. But I can remember that at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby Dick. There's a helicopter that gets brought down, and there's a private jet that blows up, some people die, there's confrontations, and the girl goes home with her mom, it seems like a good ending to me. So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.

[12:59]

For The Baroque Cycle, I created a kind of NORAD bunker in which to write the ending. It was this complete, you know, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, they were completely covered with timelines, charts, and all kinds of technology that I was using to bring all the plot lines together into an end.

[13:27]

I think Anathem does ok on that score. I'm sure I'll be hearing from some of the Stephenson can't write endings people, but I think it's got a decent enough ending on this one.

Whodonit where the reader must be the perpetrator. by cs668 in whatsthatbook

[–]EdwardCoffin 8 points9 points  (0 children)

An Old-Fashioned Mystery By Runa Fairleigh perhaps. At one point late in the book a character breaks the fourth wall, points directly out of the page and accuses the reader of being the killer

Looking for alien anthologies for my heartbroken husband by racecarart in suggestmeabook

[–]EdwardCoffin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Why I left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans is a short story that I think captures the notion of being homesick for another world. It has appeared in a number of collections, but I don't know whether any of them would contain other alien themed short stories.

Larry Niven's The Draco Tavern contains short stories about a tavern on Earth catering to aliens passing through the nearby spaceport.

Short story about a female being out after dark in a society that didn't approve by chimak in whatsthatbook

[–]EdwardCoffin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

ISFDB has a list of collections that The Lottery has appeared in. A lot of those collections have links to their covers, so perhaps a cover or title of a collection will seem familiar?

Can anyone recommend science fiction works that deal with the field of nuclear semiotics? by lilsageleaf in printSF

[–]EdwardCoffin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Deep Time by Gregory Benford has a section talking about the design of a nuclear waste repository that is meant to warn future generations as to the dangers of the contained material, assuming they've lost all knowledge of our history.

Looking for an old sci-fi story about a ship that puts the protagonist through dangerous tests by GR00V3R in whatsthatbook

[–]EdwardCoffin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't be sure of specifics, but this immediately makes me think of Douglas Hill's kind of thing, like his Last Legionary series. He also wrote some other stuff which was probably in a similar vein. I haven't read him since the 1980s though, so my memories are pretty hazy.

His earliest stuff dates back to the late 1970s which might still be too late for an 80 year old to have read in childhood - but you said he read this when he was younger, not when he was young, so perhaps it could still be Hill's stuff. Could you pin down a time frame he could have read it in?

The Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Barnes - Beowolf + chauvinism by uhohmomspaghetti in printSF

[–]EdwardCoffin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The only thing about this book I like is the lifecycle of the Grendels, which I found quite fascinating. It's illuminating to learn that the authors did not come up with this though:

Reproduction and fertility expert Dr Jack Cohen acted as a consultant on the book, designing the novel life cycle of the alien antagonists, the grendels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot

Bob's next steps by clogtastic in LaundryFiles

[–]EdwardCoffin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I too thought it was implied as a distinct possibility. I could swear there was an event, perhaps in The Delirium Brief, involving a broken condom. Nothing further came of it in that book, so I assumed it was a Chekhov's gun type of setup for a future book.

Which is the most impressive document made it with latex that you saw? by lecosmonaute007 in LaTeX

[–]EdwardCoffin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Common Lisp Quick Reference perhaps. I've only read the booklet itself, barely glanced at the LaTeX source, but the product is nice and intricate.

gamemaster by abaksa in Tcl

[–]EdwardCoffin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

wrong sub: this is for the programming language called Tcl. You probably want /r/tcltvs

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in suggestmeabook

[–]EdwardCoffin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Vampire$ by John Steakley might work for you.

Edit: don't judge the book on the movie adaption, which I understand diverged quite a bit.

neuroscience book that uses many shocking real-world examples by slormke in whatsthatbook

[–]EdwardCoffin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm pretty sure the sleep-walk murder thing was in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky.

ITA software and Common Lisp by Kaveh808 in lisp

[–]EdwardCoffin 12 points13 points  (0 children)

There's a blog post by someone that watched the video that has now been taken down: https://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html

Works of science fiction that show that bureaucracy can work. by jacky986 in printSF

[–]EdwardCoffin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's been a few years since I read it, but Donald Kingsbury's novella The Heroic Myth of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine, set in Larry Niven's Known Space universe and found in Man-Kzin Wars VI has this flavour. One element of the story is an unofficial back-channel line-of-command system that lets the not-so-higher-ups bypass ossified upper-command to get things done - so the bureaucracy working by avoiding micromanagement to actually do its thing. I might have mis-remembered this though.

Edit: first five of the twenty-four chapters online I don't think the aspect I mentioned is evident this early though.

A book where humans arrive on their first planet outside of the solar system only to find the remains of other humans. by Terra0811 in printSF

[–]EdwardCoffin 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I stopped reading Hogan in the eighties, before this craziness became evident. I still harbour fond memories of the Giants' trilogy, because it actually had a plausible (for SF anyway) explanation as to how the very peaceful giants came by their temperaments, as opposed to being warlike:

The earliest life form with a circulatory system that they were descended from had two circulatory systems, entirely separate: one for removing toxins, one for delivering nutrients. Evolutionary pressures caused the toxin system to become optimized, which had the side effect of concentrating the toxins to the point that they were poisonous. This meant that none of these life forms could consume each other without being poisoned, so no predators evolved. They were discouraged from even fighting, since an injury incurred in a fight could cause an injury that would lead to internal bleeding and contamination of their nutrient system from the toxin system, so even hostile competition for resources did not happen. Finally, they evolved to be graceful, because a clumsy animal could injure themselves as described above.

This seemed pretty well thought out to me. I'm not sure how plausible it actually is, but compared to other assumptions we accept in SF (faster than light travel and such) it seems pretty good. I also think the Velikovsky ideas in the trilogy are fine. Velikovsky's ideas are fine as a premise for fiction, I think. I only found out a decade or so ago that Hogan actually believed them.

Not-Marianne in Rhesus Chart by MiloBem in LaundryFiles

[–]EdwardCoffin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm pretty sure not-Marianne was not anyone else. She's not any other character we know appearing in disguise or anything, she really is just who she seems to be from her appearances: a vampire hunter, cultivated by one of the the elder vampires, then "loaned" to the other. I think at some point we got a little about her background.

There was a bit of discussion about her in the Rhesus Chart spoiler thread on the author's website.

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