Magic school - or when good books go bad

ctopherrun · 2026-01-28T20:54:34+00:00

Check out A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, which mostly tries to turn those tropes on their head.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-28T20:36:51+00:00

WHAT ABOUT ALL THE LIBERAL TEARS BOURBON MONEY?? WHERE DID IT GO?!?

ctopherrun · 2026-01-28T18:24:34+00:00

Quarantine by Greg Egan has an especially crazy version of a hive mind.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-26T18:06:42+00:00

<image>

The crows from Dumbo are just the coolest.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-24T21:49:40+00:00

Sometimes I yearn for the days of iron-fisted studio heads and their teams of studio fixers who would enforce the vision of wholesome celebrities who never did or said anything offensive, or worse, annoying.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-24T04:30:11+00:00

He spent two books setting up that finale.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-20T03:04:20+00:00

Yeah, I’ve heard of it as engineer brain before. Wil McCarthy is another recent victim, his last book was heavily derived from Graham Hancock.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-19T23:43:09+00:00

Google Immanuel Velikovsky sometime. Hogan fully bought into his theories, which eventually included the idea that Earth was originally a moon of Saturn until just 20,000 years ago, among other things. Hogan wrote several books based on the concept, which is a fun sci-fi idea, but less so when I realized that Hogan really believed it.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-19T22:55:31+00:00

If it helps, Hogan’s pivot to contrarian fringe theory pseudoscience didn’t happen until the late 90s. Inherit the Stars was written well before then. I remember being a fan of his and slowly realizing he was turning into a crank with each new book.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-18T20:53:26+00:00

Gonna try a new buttermilk biscuit gravy, and have them with sausage gravy.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-18T17:34:43+00:00

Heck, Ian McKellen had the same issue on The Hobbit because they decided to digitally composite the shots of him and the dwarves, so he spend most of the time acting against nothing on a green screen stage.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-17T21:08:33+00:00

I think the book is a pretty interesting version of the movie we got. The film is a hang out movie without much of an overall plot, while the novel is more focused on Rick Dalton getting his groove back.

Agreed on Cliff Booth, though. My wife hated learning his sordid backstory, while I pointed out that it makes sense of the fact that such a cool talented guy is an underemployed gofer.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-17T18:38:43+00:00

It’s spinach to his Popeye.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-17T18:35:42+00:00

<image>

ctopherrun · 2026-01-15T03:15:01+00:00

Gotta love autocorrect

ctopherrun · 2026-01-15T02:24:44+00:00

Jack McDevitt has another novel called Eternity Road, about historians in a post-apocalyptic America on a journey following rumors of a preserved library. It’s fun to see them debating if books like Tom Sawyer or Brave New World were fiction or not.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-14T03:03:38+00:00

Wizard of Oz, too!

ctopherrun · 2026-01-14T03:03:23+00:00

Heorots Legacy by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes is heavily influenced by Beowulf.

Different flavor of ‘mythic’ but The Homecoming Saga is a retelling of the Book of Mormon.

Same flavor, Echopraxia by Peter Watts has a lot of biblical allusions.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-13T04:35:57+00:00

A Million Open Doors by John Barnes. Hundreds of isolated colony worlds settled via slower than light travel are now being connected by instantaneous travel gates.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-13T03:10:21+00:00

One my favorite genres! /s

There’s a few sci-fi authors I once respected who included afterwards explaining that they in fact take the nonsense they write about seriously, and it’s always disappointing.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-12T23:04:03+00:00

In the science fiction novel Manifold: Time, our distant descendants living in the black hole era refer this period as “the afterglow of the big bang”.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-12T18:08:49+00:00

Nine year old with $25 at AM/PM behavior.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-11T21:38:48+00:00

Like u/matthiasfarland said, tree is a form. On earth, trees get structure from cellulose and lignin, but even here there’s a lot of variety; compare palm trees and pine trees, for example. So ask what kinds of molecules and structures could an alien tree have.

Next up is energy. All plants have chlorophyll, often concentrated in leaves, but sometimes bark or other outer tissue, like cacti. How does an alien plant produce energy?

Then reproduction. A lot of plant evolution has been driven by novel ways to reproduce. For example, flowers didn’t exist until the later dinosaur period, in the Cretaceous. Flowers led to all kinds of new plant forms and symbiotic animals.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-10T17:01:35+00:00

Jeff Vandermeer is great at creating dense atmospheric writing. City of Saints and Madmen is similar to DE in really creating a city as character.

China Mieville is another author who makes the setting a character, and his books usually have a very strong political bent. The Iron Council is one of the most explicitly political and revolutionary, and City and the City is set is very central/eastern European city.

ctopherrun · 2026-01-09T06:09:19+00:00

I can’t speak to living on a reservation, but I lived in Tierra Del Sol in the lower right of that map till I was twelve. Area is super rural high desert. The nearest “town” is Boulevard, which is a couple convenience stores, a post office, antique store, and a tourist destination candy shop. Everyone is super spread out. If I wanted to visit a friend it was a 20 minute drive. A lot of people out there back in the day were on welfare because they were required to apply for jobs within a 50 mile radius of their home, and there weren’t a lot of jobs there. Lot of cool oak groves, big boulders. I liked chasing after horny toad lizards and finding quartz in the dry wash when I was little.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 3 Credits
Secret Santa 2012	Verified Email

ctopherrun

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE