I’m going to try something new and post a deal on a book that I plan on reading. There’s a Kindle edition sale on The Robot Chronicles for just 99 cents! This is a compilation of recent stories from a wide range of authors. I’m a huge fan of robot stories so this is sure to be a dollar well spent. Reviewing Asimov’s complete Robot & Foundation Universe was one of the main reasons I created this site. One of the newer authors I’ve been reading is Hugh Howey, featured in this compilation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his Wool/Shift/Dust series (sadly not reviewed yet) and look forward to his approach on this subject. This will also be a good opportunity to explore some other authors.
The print price is $15.99, with the Kindle edition going to $5.99 just over 5 days from the time of this posting. Buy now, for less than the cost of a soda!
Timeline discussion:
Here are a couple quotes — “Atomic warfare had done its worst to Earth. Most of it was hopelessly radioactive and useless.” and “The radioactivity of the soil was a vast sea of iridescent blue, sparkling in strange festoons that spelled out the manner in which the nuclear bombs had once landed, a full generation before the force-field defense against nuclear explosions had been developed, so that no other world could commit suicide in just that fashion again.” — The Stars, Like Dust (more…)
As I sat down to write this review, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I read an entire physical book. Since 2018, all my novel reading has been on a Kindle Paperwhite. Before that, I used a Kindle Fire but still alternated with physical books. Reading on the Fire was always a bit of a hassle because of the glare. The Paperwhite’s e-paper display is in a completely different league. I like it so much that when I revisited the Foundation novels a few years ago, I borrowed the ebooks from my local library even though I already had the physical copies on my shelf. One nice perk of the Paperwhite is that it’s easier to read while eating because I can flip pages with my knuckle.
Recently I wanted to disconnect from electronics before bed. The best way seemed to be grabbing something from my bookshelf that I hadn’t read yet and didn’t already have digitally. That’s when I noticed Svaha by Charles de Lint. I vaguely remembered seeing a recommendation for it years ago and picking up a copy through Book Mooch, a site where people trade books they’re done with. I’m pretty sure it’s been sitting unread for over ten years.
When I pulled Svaha off the shelf, I could barely remember how or why I got it. The cover, showing a Native American man with a wolf, didn’t ring any bells, and the back-cover description didn’t sound like my usual genre. Most of my reading leans toward science fiction and, more recently, fantasy. Still, I decided to trust my past self and give it a shot.
The story takes place in Canada sometime after 2094. Without spoiling too much, the setup is that in the 1990s a Native American named Daniel Hollow Horn became a music superstar and used his fortune to educate and empower his people. Over time they became world leaders in science, technology, and law, eventually surpassing the rest of the world. After a period of war, they withdrew into self-contained “Enclaves,” kind of like Wakanda from Black Panther, except everyone knows where they are. They managed to protect themselves from the pollution and fallout left behind while the rest of the world fell apart.
Published 39 years ago in 1979, Isaac Asimov discussed the possibilities of finding intelligent life in his book Extraterrestrial Civilizations. This has been on my reading list for quite a long time, but I just now got the notion to mark it off. Having read literally all of Asimov’s fiction, I thought it was time to read more of his non-fiction. Unwittingly, I finished this just a week or two before his birthday, which by the way was 99 years ago today!
I was thinking Extraterrestrial Civilizations would be a discussion on what civilizations might be like when if/when we discover them, or they discover us. It turned out to be more of a thought experiment, methodically laying out probabilities based on list of assumptions. Most of these assumptions were made with what scientific knowledge there was available at the time. Asimov was very careful to speckle the book with asterisks noting that if certain assumptions would change in the future, the predictions would be changed or invalidated.(more…)
