Claudia > Recent Status Updates

[KSR] He engages in the great question of the present day-environmental degradation, and what we are going to do about it - by showing with compellingly painstaking vividness and precision just how hard it would be to confect all the elements of a working vital environment from scratch. He is the contemporary writer most engaged in, and most eloquent about, ecological questions, and that is a great strength.

The novella Picnic by the roadside 1977 is a brilliantly handled mood-piece, dealing with a mysterious Zone in Canada where aliens, it seems, have discarded various artefacts. It was filmed by Russian director Andrei Tarkovski as Stalker (1979), which is either the most magisterially beautiful and profound, or else the most constipated and boring, film ever made. It is really hard to be sure either way.

The company Detective Comics Inc (as its name suggests, it specialized in crime-story pulps and is better known today as a publisher under its initials DC Comics) published the more SF Action Comics in 1938. This was the venue for the first Superman comics [...] Imitators followed, including Captain Marvel, who first appeared in Whiz Comics in 1940

Wells published the first version of The Time Machine in the small-circulation Science School Journal as early as 1888, under the distinctly ugly title 'The Chronic Argonauts'-a phrase that sounds not so much the name of a novel as a medical diagnosis.

Eliza Haywood published The Invisible Spy (1755) under the pseudonym Exploralibus. It is a shapeless but entertaining novel based upon two particular pseudo-technological novums: a 'belt' that renders its wearer invisible; and a Dictaphone-style 'wonderful Tablet' which records 'every word that is spoken in as distinct a manner as if engraved' [Haywood, 5].

SF begins as a distinctly Protestant kind of fantastic writing that budded off from the older (broadly) Catholic traditions of magical and fantastic romances and stories, responding to the new sciences, the advances of which were also tangled up in complex ways with Reformation culture.

No Choice by K.J. Parker available for free on Subterranean Press: https://subterraneanpress.com/newsann...

"Stephen King.

King: You didn't make this up, did you? [Studying Karen] I'd like to see this house."

In many legends the 'centre of the world' is concretized as a tree or a pillar symbolizing a vertical axis mundi. The ancient Greeks placed the 'navel' of the world (omphalos) in Delphi, while the Romans considered their Capitol as caput mundi. Eliade points out that in most beliefs it is difficult to reach the centre. It is an ideal goal, which one can only attain after a 'hard journey.' ↘️

New Year, new bug: I tried to respond to comments on my review, and I get "Review is not commentable". Does anyone else have this bug?

Oh, oh, a new bug! Yey!!🤦‍♀️

Free to from Tor.com: The Alloy of Law, by Brandon Sanderson

Download before 11:59 PM ET, August 5th, 2022. https://ebookclub.tor.com

Important in this was Muir's often-expressed love of animals. [...] During his childhood, farm animals had stood in for the human friends he never had; he regarded them as intelligent and worthy of our care, even our reverence. He often used the phrase "our horizontal brothers and sisters," which even now speaks to us in ways we have not taken on.

Largely free of domestic responsibilities and finding his job not very challenging, Einstein found time to discuss philosophy with a group of friends he had met shortly after he first arrived in Bern. Fashioning themselves after the ancient Greeks, they called themselves the "Olympia Academy." The founding member was Maurice Solovine, a student from Romania who was interested in an eclectic range of subjects.

A breath, a step, a heartbeat. The shadow of a cloud, racing over the land. Cloud and granite; moment and eon. Same laws of physics for both, but different affect. Or the composite affect of the two interpenetrated: very much a Sierra feeling. The eon in every moment.

Sublime writing ❤️

The LSD made the blisters seem trivial, even funny. I named one Jacob and the other Crouch, and the one developing on the front of my ankle I named Achilles, which I thought was very funny. Yes, I was stoned.

😂😂

"The original (and much scoffed-at) plan was for me to finally capture, subdue, and present to the readers that most elusive beast (at least for me) - an actual three-volume trilogy. I have tried and failed several times before, but I was plucky and optimistic again this time, certain I could constrain my tale to three convenient volumes. Short version: I failed. Again."

Fail away, Tad, fail away, please.

"A lot of people get wrapped up in their own importance. You can try and steer them to the right way of thinking - I've spent more than half my life working that beat - but usually you can't save people from themselves if they're hell-bent on fucking their lives up through egomaniacal behavior. Some people never appreciate what they have and are always focused on what they don't."

"If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition."

"As a philosopher in our part of the world once said: 'The artifacts of a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be indistinguishable from magic'."

Nice touch :)

Two years before he enjoyed the validation conferred upon him by an Oscar, Eminen was described by US President George Bush as 'the most dangerous threat to american children since polio'.

🤔😳 Lol

What would you think of an army in which, in a single year, 2002, a complete battalion, more than five hundred men, had been killed not by enemy fire but by beatings

Free to from Tor.com; download before 11:59 PM ET, February 18th, 2022: https://ebookclub.tor.com

New from GlitchReads: 60 followers gone, 4 new friend requests, one from someone to whom I'm a friend already, the others from March, June and August, which I declined at the time. WTF, how does this platform works?!

Free to download from Tor.com: A HISTORY OF WHAT COMES NEXT (A Take Them to the Stars Novel) by Sylvain Neuvel

Download before 11:59 PM ET, November 5th, 2021

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GIDEON THE NINTH (The Locked Tomb Series, Book #1) by Tamsyn Muir

Download before 11:59 PM ET, October 8th, 2021

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"Someone's messed with the satellites," Val concluded, staring at her wrist screen. [...] All satellite connections appeared to be severed, which was amazing, because there were a lot of satellites up there. The GPS system alone relied on making contact with up to eight satellites per fix. She tried the radio again. No more luck than before.

Perfect timing 😂

"The world is a body. Rocks are the skeleton, arteries are watercourses, trees are the muscles, clouds are the respiration. We are the thoughts. Here then we can say that the body has been stripped to the skeleton, for there are no muscles, or veins, or arteries. Yet still the breath of clouds. A skeleton that breathes under its white cloak, and from time to time wakes, and thinks."

"He saw more clearly every day that the big slogan-ideas like democracy, free markets, technological advancement, scientific objectivity, and progress in history, were all myths on the same level as the feudal divine right of kings: self-serving alibis that a minority of rich powerful people were using to control the world."

Free to download from Tor.com: HAMMERS ON BONE
(Persons Non Grata, Volume 1) by Cassandra Khaw

Download before 11:59 PM ET, September 17th, 2021

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