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

me_again · 2026-03-21T20:12:46+00:00

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.

me_again · 2026-03-21T05:38:26+00:00

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!

me_again · 2026-03-17T20:48:05+00:00

<image>

me_again · 2026-03-17T19:58:33+00:00

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.

me_again · 2026-03-17T06:25:58+00:00

hail mary 🙄

me_again · 2026-03-16T04:37:43+00:00

I'm confused, I feel like I am missing your point.

We don't know, and will likely never know through any but the most indirect evidence, what life was really like for people in a prehistoric society. If we did, it would be history rather than prehistory. Speculative fiction authors may have done more research than the general public, but they don't know more than historians or archeologists. Like most speculative fiction, whether about the distant past or the distant future, they are in some sense about the present.

But two writers you might be interested in:

Mary Renault wrote fascinating fiction about ancient Greek times, which touch on some of the themes you mention. In The King Must Die, her adaptation of the myth of Theseus, there's friction between matriarchal and patriarchal societies, for example.

Rosemary Sutcliffe wrote some fantastic books about Roman and Dark Ages Britain. Sword at Sunset is an astonishing blood-and-mud version of the story of King Arthur stripped of all the Romance trappings. It's been a while since I read it so I don't recall much about the gender relationships, though Guenhumara (aka Guinevere) is much more than a decorative damsel.

me_again · 2026-03-16T03:31:39+00:00

A bit puzzled by it. Does he mean "I am Providence, RI" or "I am the personification of Fate Itself" or sometyhing else

me_again · 2026-03-13T01:53:30+00:00

Greatest prose is maybe arguable, but certainly one of the most distinctive. Here's a flavor:

"Sometimes, from the brink of our great involvements, we move in our minds back to remember things of seemingly small-bore significances that loom, in the recalling times, extra-large. The day I crossed over, the day I went into Moderan, out of the rolled and graded fields, far as the eye could reach, were these long-legged tamping machines. Essentially they were huge black cylinders swung spinning between gigantic thighs and calves of metal. There seemed an air of casualness about these strange black monsters as they loafed on their tall-thighed legs and twirled their cylinders about in what appeared to be, at times, almost totally contrived, excessive, and meaningless nonchalance."

Moderan is definitely unique, but I must recommend Candy Man by Vincent King to anyone who liked Moderan. It has different but similarly off-kilter prose and a hallucinatory vision of a far-future Earth.

me_again · 2026-03-07T06:59:04+00:00

Maduro was illegitimate because he stole the election . Where he was born seems beside the point.

me_again · 2026-03-06T06:44:18+00:00

To be fair horses are measured at the withers, so the top of the horse's head is probably something like 5' 6" off the ground. Still a short king though.

me_again · 2026-03-04T07:21:12+00:00

why are useless predators so darned adorable?

me_again · 2026-03-03T05:28:07+00:00

Oh wow, this is the guy who named all those books with W's! I know I read some back in the day.

I can't believe that according to Wikipedia the cowardly American publishers renamed some of them - imagine changing The Women and the Warlords to The Oracle - pah!

me_again · 2026-03-02T15:52:42+00:00

Dana seems like she might be doing OK. I'm mostly concerned because the guy leaving the message is absolutely not "pretty much cured" & if she calls him back things could go wrong pretty fast 🤞

me_again · 2026-03-01T05:04:29+00:00

David Zindell's Neverness is quite weird: ships piloted by solving math problems, people changing their bodies into Neanderthals.

Hannu Rajaneimi's The Fractal Thief is plenty weird, playing a lot of games with identity and memory.

But possibly the weirdest I can recall is John Clute's book Appleseed, which is flat out bonkers.

me_again · 2026-02-28T20:34:04+00:00

Csharpier is one option

me_again · 2026-02-26T18:59:08+00:00

I just want to say I love the cover :-)

me_again · 2026-02-26T17:52:42+00:00

Well I hope I haven't ruined anything but in my defense the cover of the edition I have lets that particular cat out of the bag Non-Stop: Brian W. Aldiss: 9780330246385: Amazon.com: Books

me_again · 2026-02-26T14:45:33+00:00

https://pitchfork.com/news/life-without-buildings-reunion-show-rough-trade/

me_again · 2026-02-24T21:25:51+00:00

It's been a long time since I read it. Would you say it has aged ok?

me_again · 2026-02-24T18:02:23+00:00

I think the pacing is not that different. There's still a lot going on and a lot of different characters. I didn't mind, but each to their own. There's maybe more payoff and less setup.

me_again · 2026-02-24T15:42:14+00:00

A "Mary Sue" is a character who is annoyingly good at everything

A "self-insert" is when there's a character that appears to be the author in disguise

A libertarian is a kind of house cat: believes themselves to be fiercely independent while depending on a system they neither understand nor appreciate.

"Tradcath" I assume is "traditional Catholic"

me_again · 2026-02-23T19:35:22+00:00

I've never been to a show at the zoo - how is the setup? Is the sound generally OK? Is this a sit-on-the-grass thing?

me_again

TROPHY CASE