Alexander’s Comments (group member since Apr 19, 2024)

Alexander’s comments from the Beyond Reality group.

Hi everyone!

I guess I'll start off.

I finished this book one month ago and, looking back, the stories that stayed with me the most were The Lifecycle of Software Objects and Exhalation itself.

I thought the latter was a very clever take on entropy, illustrating what is happening in the universe at large through a smaller scale setup. It's perhaps my favorite of the bundle.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects was... touching. It's an interesting topic, whether at some point we'll come to the conclusion that our digital creations have reached the threshold of consciousness and whether that would entail that we need to attribute rights to them. It'll also be interesting to see whether this would influence discussions about animal rights. I'm sure we'll see more stories and discussions about this in the near future.

In general, I was impressed with all the stories, really, in that they all managed to communicate one idea very clearly. I naturally tend to gravitate towards writers who produce more flowery texts, and I did not encounter any prose bordering on poetry in this work... But it's undeniable that Ted Chiang is great at what he does, and I'm very happy to have found this book through Beyond Reality!

I'm currently reading Roadside Picnic, which is great so far!

And I hope to make progress on the other sci fi books I received yesterday:

This Is How You Lose the Time War
Ice
We Who Are About To...
The Palace of Eternity
A Case of Conscience
The Dying Earth
Downward to the Earth
and the better known Hyperion and The Simulacra

Kathi wrote: "

Whew, my head was spinning! Quite an eclectic assortment!"

Haha, so is mine, Kathi, so is mine...!

I'm currently finishing The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. It's my third try, and I'm finally in the mind space to appreciate it the way it deserves. What a book!

I started this month with Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I liked it, but the lengthy prose can get oh so dry.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a nice comic relief after that one. Then I snacked on Adrian Tchaikovski's Ironclads (military sci-fi, not my favourite genre, but his quirky style still made me appreciate it) and finished Aspects of the Novel.

I'm reading some (non sci-fi) books in other languages on the side, where the progress is slower. I'm currently halfway the Swedish book Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared), reading Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune, Camus's La Chute and Ernaux's L'Autre Fille.

Lastly, and under the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin, I'm also reading Tao Te Ching, which is very nice to read a couple of pages of every day.

Oh, and I just started Hyperion. I should really read fewer books all at once.

I finally got around to reading Babel-17 and also snacked on 'Lucian's A True Story', which apparently is 'the first sci-fi ever written' (unless somebody can point me to an even older 'SF' tale?).

I'm currently two-thirds of the way through Exhalation, a collection of sci-fi short stories and I have to say I'm really enjoying them!

I'll probably pick up Neuromancer as my next book for May.