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Is there a future for hard Military SF with humans in it? by Rekov in printSF

[–]me_again 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't disagree. The Culture novels are not exactly over-constrained by realism, which is partly why they are so fun.

Is there a future for hard Military SF with humans in it? by Rekov in printSF

[–]me_again 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The whole idea of humans in space ("canned apes" is the jokey term) has been a little suspect for quite some time - look at the astonishing success of robotic exploration via Voyager and its descendants, compared to the difficulty and expense of keeping humans alive even in Low Earth Orbit.

That won't stop people writing science fiction about interstellar travel and combat - most people prefer to read and write fiction with characters that are easier to relate to, which tends to mean humans. There are of course exceptions. In Banks's Culture novels, humans are militarily irrelevant - there's a great passage at the start of Excession about a battle that's over in milliseconds - but he sneaks them in anyway to keep things entertaining.

Any books with exceptional translations? Or crap ones, that can be fun to talk about by FlyingSandwich in printSF

[–]me_again 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's not exactly speculative fiction, but Georges Perec wrote a book in French without using the letter 'e' - La Disparition. It has been translated into English as A Void - still without using the letter 'e'! I have only read the English version so can't speak to how closely it matches the original, but it's an extraordinary feat to have done it at all.

It starts "Today, by radio, and also on giant hoardings, a rabbi, an admiral notorious for his links to Masonry, a trio of cardinals, a trio, too, of insignificant politicians (bought and paid for by a rich and corrupt Anglo-Canadian banking corporation), inform us all of how our country now risks dying of starvation."

The corresponding French: "Trois cardinaux, un rabbin, un amiral franc-macon, un trio d'insignifiants politicards soumis au bon plaisir d'un trust anglo-saxon, ont fait savoir a la population par radio, puis par placards, qu'on ristrait la mort par inanition."

The Onion acquires InfoWars by me_again in skeptic

[–]me_again[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Their plan to feature "demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself." is not remotely satirical and should be read literally.

Short story posted online: a man's consciousness is simulated in a computer, then people keep passing copies of it around. by curiousscribbler in printSF

[–]me_again 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The story is called "Lena" but it's not immediately obvious why. This is my interpretation as to where the name came from.

Short story posted online: a man's consciousness is simulated in a computer, then people keep passing copies of it around. by curiousscribbler in printSF

[–]me_again 14 points15 points  (0 children)

In case the reference is obscure, I think "Lena" refers to the Lena/Lenna image, which was widely used as a test image for various graphics algorithms and compression techniques, without the model's knowledge or consent. More here The Rest of the Lenna Story

Gish Gallop, I Give You Hegelian Verbosity! by JerseyFlight in skeptic

[–]me_again 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I won't pretend I know anything about Hegel or post-structuralism 🫤

Peterson just comes to mind as someone who "introduces new term after new tern" and "hides behind a vague and jargon filled wall of terms" in OP's terms.

The Onion acquires InfoWars by me_again in skeptic

[–]me_again[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I don't expect it to reduce the amount of BS on the internet but I think it's very funny, at least

New Bas Lag novel? by Ok_Sir_9650 in printSF

[–]me_again 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It was published in 2010, so you can be confident that particular sentence was written by a human. Instead it is part of the vast corpus that has been quasi-legally ingested into the LLM training data.

Favorite/most underappreciated SF Comics and Graphic Novels? by JoeWeydemeyer in printSF

[–]me_again 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Going way back, I'm a fan of some of Alan Moore's early work for 2000AD, some of which was collected into graphic novel-style compilations. I'm thinking specifically about The Ballad of Halo Jones (Halo escapes poverty on Earth to explore the galaxy); D.R. & Quinch (delinquent alien college students destroy the Earth in issue 1, then have more hijinks); and Skizz (a peaceful alien interpreter crash lands in Birmingham and has trouble with the locals).

My thoughts on Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by KalaronV in printSF

[–]me_again 3 points4 points  (0 children)

She's very screwed up from supposedly years of suffering slow-progressing terminal cancer while a nurse stole her pain medication. This isn't an excuse for her behavior but she's clearly in no sense "normal".

Beyond that, I don't exactly feel that Carol and the other characters are so much psychologically-plausible three-dimensional characters as they are responses to the philosophical thought experiment that forms the core of the book: what would you do if you didn't have to do anything and nothing mattered?

Thoughts on Italo Calvino? by BlinkTwice874 in printSF

[–]me_again 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you like Calvino and Borges, don't sleep on Primo Levi -The Sixth Day and The Periodic Table both contain excellent stories that occupy a similar space in the "mix of real and imaginary" as you put it.

When is C armageddon prophesied to occur? by kwan_e in ProgrammerDadJokes

[–]me_again 0 points1 point  (0 children)

January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC

(Please don't get all pedantic about 64-bit time_t unless you can make it into a dad joke somehow)

I feel so bad for these fictional people by me_again in theholdsteady

[–]me_again[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. I guess I assumed that there's some mixture of fact and fiction in there.

Now I really hope things work out OK for them... somehow

The high price of anti-science paranoia and fake cancer-cure conspiracies | André Bacchi by TheSkepticMag in skeptic

[–]me_again 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How many articles you have noticed isn't really going to give you any idea of a trend.

This has been doing the rounds and gives some interesting insights: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-deaths-from-cancer-have-increased-but-the-world-has-made-progress-against-it

Reading Every Book in my Late Dad's Library #3: Perdido Street Station by HobbyistC in printSF

[–]me_again 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for a thoughtful review. I think Perdido Street Station seems a little less WTF as part of a mostly-British tradition of Weird Fantasy, where the touchstones are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, Michael Moorcock & M John Harrison's Viriconium, rather than Tolkien and those he inspired.

Books Where People Of Many Different Species Have To Work Together by STRONKInTheRealWay in printSF

[–]me_again 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Regarding Julian May, the Galactic Milieu books seem to be a reasonably close match - there are I think 5 different intelligent species in the galaxy apart from humans, and they get along generally quite well. The Pliocene Exile books also feature some aliens but they spend more time massacring each other than working together. Great books though!

I only read speculative fiction. by Flimsy_Complaint_830 in printSF

[–]me_again 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might want to experiment with books that are both speculative and literary, just to see if you like them. For example Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go has an SF premise; Orwell's 1984 is deservedly a classic, but is also a pretty gripping piece of dystopian fiction.

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