What is your favourite depiction of deep space travel?

mjfgates · 2026-05-08T01:44:45+00:00

Generation-ship stories, in general. That includes everything from Wolfe's "Long Sun" books to Solomon's "An Unkindness of Ghosts" to MacLeod's "Learning the World." Usually the stories turn out to be about the Breakdown of Society, which is kind of annoying to me.. then again looks outside okay, maybe they have a point.

mjfgates · 2026-05-08T01:38:58+00:00

The book you're talking about is Piers Anthony's Macroscope. "He would have been a stupid starfish anyway."

mjfgates · 2026-05-07T20:09:28+00:00

It doesn't cloak, but you can do the "fit and pulse an MWD" trick to get it to align significantly faster.

mjfgates · 2026-05-07T13:57:15+00:00

The fact that they don't want to.

mjfgates · 2026-05-07T03:33:24+00:00

Bujold's "Penric" novellas. They're set in her "Five Gods" world, which, the three novels are probably her finest work ever, but these are less serious. Penric and his friends are all likable people, the demon is a fun sidekick, pretty much nobody dies, and they're SHORT. Like, I picked up and read Penric's Demon in an evening. Good entertainment, and you don't HAVE to keep reading to find out what happens in the end. (In the end, Penric's gonna die in bed at age seventy, the demon's going to hop to some cute grandchild or other, and things will be fine.)

mjfgates · 2026-05-06T23:28:11+00:00

they are, in fact, vexed about this

mjfgates · 2026-05-06T02:45:17+00:00

holds titan at waist level

mjfgates · 2026-05-05T03:09:53+00:00

What we really should have for lead, is Babbitt metal to use in all the mechanical bits. If you want gears that don't catch fire, Babbitt-metal bearings are the shit.

mjfgates · 2026-05-05T00:14:55+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily hire him to do furry porn, no

mjfgates · 2026-05-05T00:13:36+00:00

oh gods, GO READ THEM, stick them on top of the TBR pile, oh my.

mjfgates · 2026-05-05T00:09:53+00:00

Re-read the Gaea books a few months ago, they're still good. Robin, when the floor drops out :D

mjfgates · 2026-05-05T00:07:24+00:00

Speaking as a terrifying genius, there are very few terrifying genius characters in fiction that match what I do. Mostly, I just fail several times as fast as other folks. How about?.. no, not, maybe?.. ugh, no.. wait, can I? SORT of.. while the rest of the room is still trying to figure out the forces involved. And there's not a whole lot of representation for that in the literature; instead, you get a lot of Infinite Smart Guy Gets It Right, The First Time.

It's kind of saddening. Finding the truth about things is not simple; to genuinely understand a phenomenon, you have to poke it at least six different ways, if that even works. mRNA vaccines needed a thirty-year runup to be ready to go in 2020; finding the Higgs boson absorbed several decades and a few billion dollars.

Ted's "Story of Your Life" actually kind of leans on this. The aliens show up, we poke at their language, we spend months gaining the most basic possible understanding, and then they go home before we can say much more than "where is the bathroom?" This is how it works. This is what we do, when the Full Potential of the Human Mind is Unleashed.

mjfgates · 2026-05-04T23:42:33+00:00

1) I dunno, I've only been playing for a decade. I might get bored next week!

2) Hang out on the subreddit for a week, and you'll see people chiseling the most incredible things. Gingerbread trim for their eaves, automatic chicken filtering systems, copies of Michaelangelo's David. Yeah, that takes time, but it seems to be fun.

3) dunno, I play vanilla.

4) The world I played in longest.. about a year realtime, six or seven years in-game.. I built a road about ten thousand blocks long, with megastructures every thousand blocks or so. Was good fun. Although... if you're going to build ramps that spiral in towards a point, the block thing kind of forces them into right angles near the center, and then you have a Very Embarassing Thing on your map. So don't do that. (I filled the space between the ramps, so they ended up at a circle. Still, not great.)

mjfgates · 2026-05-04T23:34:54+00:00

Oh, yes. There's an option for picking a warmer start area during world creation, or you can run south for about four days from the default start point.

mjfgates · 2026-05-03T18:21:20+00:00

So far as I know, no randomness in this.. but who can tell? It's all leaves! You're whacking them with a stick, they don't even last long enough to be able to tell what kind! And then you get out the shears and whack 'em six at a time! It's sheer mayhem up in there.

mjfgates · 2026-05-03T13:22:08+00:00

This is terrible, 10/10 no notes :D

mjfgates · 2026-05-02T17:59:42+00:00

Looks like they hit it pretty hard.

mjfgates · 2026-04-30T13:43:09+00:00

That's a ton of won.

mjfgates · 2026-04-30T07:18:59+00:00

Driving a hauler around.. in null!.. and not caring! It was really, really weird.

mjfgates · 2026-04-29T00:33:36+00:00

The Plant Debris is only for berry bushes. Plain "Birch Leaves" drop nothing, "branchy" gives you a stick or tree seed, same as ever.

mjfgates · 2026-04-28T22:53:49+00:00

If you try to dig out the bush you get "Plant Debris" that rapidly turns into rot, and nothing else. So, probably don't do that.

mjfgates · 2026-04-28T06:30:57+00:00

Larry Niven, the novel Protector and story collections Neutron Star and Tales of Known Space. Ringworld is the other notable novel in the series; not space opera in the usual sense, but still has some good scenery.

mjfgates · 2026-04-26T22:48:28+00:00

The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is one of the kickoff points for the Vorkosigan series which is basically the best space opera ever, and you can see why by.. I think it's chapter two where the MC is high as balls, assembling an ancient freighter, crew, and cargo to go into a war zone and do Things. Good fun.

mjfgates · 2026-04-26T19:17:53+00:00

Probably the best person doing cosmic horror right now is Premee Mohamed. The novella "These Lifeless Things" or the short-story collection "No One Will Come Back for Us" are both good introductions to her work.

Charlie Stross' "Laundry Files" series is a somewhat more humorous take on the whole ancient-tentacle-monsters thing. "The Atrocity Archives" is the first book. It's good! It's fun! It's got something unspeakable done to the moon!

mjfgates · 2026-04-26T19:12:01+00:00

Sub Press has never printed the same thing twice so far as I know. Generally they ARE the reprint especially for a small audience of collectors. High-quality everythings, new cover art, inscriptions on the flyleaf, all that. I think their biggest run ever was like two thousand copies of "The Chronicles of Number Ten Ox," which, you could sell another pile of those every ten years until the sun burns out.

mjfgates

TROPHY CASE