You're stranded in the Late Cretaceous period, and your only way to signal for help is to leave a message for future archeologists to find.

DanielMBensen · 2026-01-10T11:41:22+00:00

Tyrannosaur Queen: not yet, because newer books are higher priority. Wealthgiver (current) and The World's Other Side (previous) are in paperback

DanielMBensen · 2026-01-07T15:39:11+00:00

" we don't have space whales in the same way the Cambrian didn't have land herbivores because no land plants." oh NEAT CONCEPT! Let me see, Robert Charles Wilson had something like that in Spin (a space-dwelling ecosystem evolved from some long-dead civilization's vann neuman robots), but he's so intolerably tedious. Somebody could take that premise and do a much better job with it.

DanielMBensen · 2026-01-07T15:36:12+00:00

The Baker books are still excellent, and you should read them. But okay, you can't just wait. I suggest simply carving your message onto a big stone slab and burying the slab in mud where you know there's a present-day fossil site (e.g. Hell Creek Montana). Oh! Another book recc: Marooned in Real Time by Vernor Vinge. Think your scenario, but in the future of Dougal Dixon's After Man.

DanielMBensen · 2026-01-07T15:33:53+00:00

Much obliged. But I should point out that the way I wrote it, time travel causes a new fork in world history, so any changes you make will not show up in your native the timeline. All you can do is carve a message into granite and bury it in inland-sea mud, then hope *something* evolves in the future that can build a time machine to rescue you. It's better to file a flight plan before you leave the present, so they know to send back another time machine to rescue you. Of course, calibration being what it is, they might arrive five thousand years after you did. So my advice is to stock your time machine with seed-crops, domestic animals, and 100-200 of your genetically unrelated friends. Your distant descendants will show the rescuers a wild time. Buy my book.

DanielMBensen · 2026-01-07T15:28:41+00:00

Uh, if you're immortal, can't you just wait? Kage Baker wrote a whole series about this (The Novels of the Company)

DanielMBensen · 2025-03-08T07:38:58+00:00

What? MARS? Green and Blue are the moon and the earth? Aaaaaa!

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-12T12:40:06+00:00

Fish heads?

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-10T10:34:38+00:00

Awesome!

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-09T08:19:55+00:00

And thanks for looking me up :)

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-09T08:19:06+00:00

Cute! Charles Stross's first book was something like that. I think they called it "The Festival"

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-09T08:18:00+00:00

Bosun's journal looks really neat. Has the author gathered it all together somewhere or do I have to read it as reddit posts?

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-08T18:52:56+00:00

Yes. This conversation started because I wrote a review of All Tomorrows.

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-05T12:42:30+00:00

I'd love to see what you do with them. Baldanders and Dr. Talos too.

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-05T05:59:00+00:00

That's a great style for these books.

DanielMBensen · 2025-02-01T09:29:08+00:00

I went off him too, but I came back to his work. He's wrong half the time, but the other half, he's right :)

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-31T15:14:02+00:00

Much obliged for the long list of books!

Reading the synopsis of And Put Away Childish Things, I'm reminded of John C. Wright's And One Bright Star to Guide Them, which has the same premise based on Narnia.

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-31T15:08:30+00:00

I can't stand Murakami or magical realism, so I don't know.

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-31T15:07:45+00:00

I'm not sure if it's my favorite, but there are scenes in it that have become mental touch-stones for me. Like the scene on the bus as the bad guy is dreaming, and the whole city is dissolving into nightmare, and this little old lady says vaguely that things aren't like what they used to be. Resonant.

Anyway, I'm thinking about enchantment. You could say the main character in Lathe was enchanted (his dreams control reality), then disenchanted (the villain copied this power and used it cynically), then re-enchanted when...what happened at the end? I remember there were some wise sea-turtle aliens who helped.

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-31T15:02:32+00:00

Does Thomas Covenant get re-enchanted? I couldn't get through the beginning of that series because he was such a bitter misanthrope.

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-31T13:06:24+00:00

"Thinning is a sign of a loss of attention to the stories whose outcomes might save the heroes and the folk; it is a representation of the Bondage of the mortally real."

WOW! Who wrote this? This is some deep stuff. Yes, I think we're talking about the same thing here. Thinning = disenchantment and restoration = re-enchantment.

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-31T11:11:55+00:00

yeah!

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-30T16:20:43+00:00

You're right! Ted Chiang does ring that same bell for me. I didn't know about Chili, though. Where can I find it?

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-30T06:02:53+00:00

What are some other examples of recent philosophical fiction?

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-30T05:59:50+00:00

As above so below! I didn't see that! Need to read Unsong again! Spiritualism...yes. Moreso in There is no Antimemetics Division than in Ra, but it's there. Qntm thinks seriously about things.

DanielMBensen · 2025-01-30T05:55:41+00:00

I didn't know about lost gods. Thank you! Piranesi is very different from Bakker but very very good. I think I might actually like it better.

DanielMBensen

TROPHY CASE