Science fiction

The "bazooka" part is accurate, but not the "hiding" part. If the spacecraft are torchships, their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor.

SNAAAAAAAAAAP

Ha I have just this moment read a Reynolds short story where stealth by way of directional radiation plays a part.

lol @ dom tryna use fancy pants left wing cult-crit theories to rag on nerds. 'cuz the sopranos is totes pc, right?

Dan Simmons is indeed bananas. I like him.

The first and second Hyperion books are the best things of his I've read by some distance.

been reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons...shit is bananas

― glengarry glenn danzig (latebloomer)

They're a blast, just stop after The Fall of Hyperion. I've successfully convinced myself the two Endymion books don't exist but it took a decade.

I really liked The Terror and much of the Ilium/Olympos pair (though some of the racial/ethnic stuff is a huge mess I had to SMH at). I've had Drood for a while but haven't gone back to it after it failed to grab me. As Omar said, incredibly inconsistant writer but chockfull of ideas.

the Ilium/Olympos pair (though some of the racial/ethnic stuff is a huge mess I had to SMH at)

Yeah, there's some right weird stuff about Israel iirc. Still, lots of dazzling things going on in those books. I loved the Proust-loving robot probe thing.

John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" blew my head up this week

Just been to Tate Britain, saw a piece by Gerard Byrne with Dutch amateur actors re-enacting a 1963 Playboy interview with the great and the good of scifi - Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlen, Pohl, Sturgeon, etc, about the state of the world in 1984 and beyond. Very optimistic, albeit lightheartedly, sometimes even satirically, about automation and leisure, longevity, medicine and recreational narcotics, and especially the space race - space travel cheaper than air travel; the moon by the 70s and Mars and Venus by the 80s. Aside from video calls and conferencing, nothing about the information revolution. Makes you wonder what unforeseen transformations await us in the next 50 years.

lasers

cool i can't hardly wait!

they are coming very soon iirc!

Makes you wonder what unforeseen transformations await us in the next 50 years

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jOTDyAXEFv8/SwrkgAOVMRI/AAAAAAAAABo/4B4mXqVaRzE/s1600/waterworld-spotlight.jpg

John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" blew my head up this week

Oh, that is a lovely, lovely story. So good!

Anyone read "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi? Read some froth about it being the SF debut of the year. Amazon reviews look intriguing but make it sound kind of daunting.

That sounds right up my street.

whenever I hear the word quantum, i reach for my revolver

...and end unwittingly causing a typhoon in South East Asia.

weird, i was looking at the reviews of Quantam Thief earlier as well! anyone?

I've bought a copy, and it seems genuinely interesting but I've only read one chapter so far.

I've been reading some Adam Roberts, he's pretty good. Not at all hard. Some real oddball concepts and fairly literary.

Also often very funny. He moonlights writing Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter spoofs, presumably for ££.

reading the new culture, am pretty into it

The Quantum Thief is pretty cool. It doesn't take any prisoners though. Rajaniemi is a String Theorist by trade; the weird, cutting-edge science stuff is laid on pretty thick and with no quarter given to those who might have no idea as to what on earth he might be talking about...

just finished the quantum thief - it was great. a lot left unexplained but it had enough of a 'human' (or post-human even) story underpinning the crazy stuff to keep me reading. the stuff abt the exomemory + 'gevulot' was particularly cool

i'm currently reading 'stories of your life and others' by ted chiang....wow

so are there any good SF novels of the endgame of climate change? I could google, but that's no fun.

the bacigalupi(?) thing, The Wind-up Girl touches on this. it's not about that, but is set in a post climate change, post GM crop disaster world. (i didn't like it tbh)

(wow, i spelt bacigalupi right!)

John Brunner "The Sheep Look Up"

I can think of a bunch of books that touch on it or use it as background (Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example), but that's the only one springing to mind that uses it as the central focus

baccy-go-loopy is more about the exhaustion of resources than climate change maybe? but i did read ship-breaker first. i got the feeling that that was one of the coming areas in the genre, that and the neurological basis of consciousness

I can think of a bunch of books that touch on it or use it as background (Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example

hm forgot Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" uses some serious climate change/weather disruptions as its backdrop. it's not very good though.

haven't read KSR's latest but I wouldn't be surprised

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Late_the_Sweet_Birds_Sang

Early Ballard disaster novels? The Drowned World, The Burning World...I haven't read The Crystal World so I can't speak to that one.

http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/greenhouse/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_(manga)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2013 is very very good (and has a load of stuff about climate change if Morbs is still checking this thread).

Haha, it's actually called 2312. 2013 is the year we are in.

jonathan frakes telling you you're wrong for 47 seconds pic.twitter.com/zU7HqQjGdN

— *gated reverb snare* (@softsynthbear) April 12, 2019