Doctor Catherine Coldbridge travels to darkest Texas in quest of her long-lost husband, Frank Humble... so she can kill the unkillable man.

The Unkillable Frank Lightning by Josh Rountree
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([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll Sep. 8th, 2025 10:28 am)
2013: The Tories masterfully tank the UK credit rating, a grateful nation celebrates Margaret Thatcher’s death, and Scotland inexplicably chooses to remain in the UK.


Poll #33586 Clarke Award Finalists 2013
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10


Which 2013 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
2 (20.0%)

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
7 (70.0%)

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
2 (20.0%)

Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
1 (10.0%)

Nod by Adrian Barnes
1 (10.0%)

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
0 (0.0%)



✓ for read, * for intend to read, ! for never heard of it. Or whatever amuses you.

Which 2013 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson ✓
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway ✓
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
Nod by Adrian Barnes
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
Next chapter will be delayed for a week, and will be posted Sunday, September 21st.

Read more... )
redbird: apple-shaped ice on a tree branch (ghost apple)
([personal profile] redbird Sep. 6th, 2025 11:01 pm)
We bought a few Swiss gourmet apples at the farmers market on Thursday, because [personal profile] adrian_turtle likes them, and I like trying new (or new-to-me) apples.

I tried one this afternoon. It was OK, but nothing special: crisp, moderately juicy, and tarter than I generally like. I thought [personal profile] cattitude might like it, because he likes tart apples, but his verdict is that there wasn't enough flavor there, though what there was, was good.

I'm going to leave the other two for Adrian, and eat Zestars; we bought some of those yesterday.
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([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll Sep. 6th, 2025 02:04 pm)
So I rolled up a bunch of Icons characters. Mostly boring, but this one is at least mildly amusing.

Doctor* Shawinigan**

Read more... )
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Five books new to me, at least four of which are fantasy (not sure about the El-Mohtar) and three instalments in series.

Books Received, August 30 — September 5


Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39


Books Received, August 30 — September 5

View Answers

Lies Weeping by Glen Cook (November 2025)
21 (53.8%)

Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories by Amal El-Mohtar (March 2026)
24 (61.5%)

The River and the Star By Gabriela Romero Lacruz (October 2025)
7 (17.9%)

The Bookshop Below by Georgia Summers (November 2025)
15 (38.5%)

The Burning Queen by Aparna Verma (November 2025)
9 (23.1%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
27 (69.2%)

finch: (Robin again)
([personal profile] finch Sep. 4th, 2025 04:47 pm)

Over on the 32-bit cafe board, Eladnarra linked to a recent post of hers about disability in the recent blog post thread, and two other community members chimed in about their wives' experiences as breast cancer survivors, and I started thinking. My thoughts got a little overgrown for a reply on a message board, so I thought I'd write a post instead.

cw for medical discussion, unsurprisingly )

I don't have a conclusion. Just... I was thinking about it.



The malevolent Hierarchs are dead. The only way to learn about them is archaeology. The only thing worse than archaeologists not finding the relics of evil sorcerers is finding relics of evil sorcerers.

Queen Demon (The Rising World, volume by Martha Wells
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([personal profile] jducoeur Sep. 3rd, 2025 09:10 pm)

After far too many years, I finally got around to watching the third of the Stargate series.

Summary: I really wanted to like this show, but... not so much. It's not bad, but it completely fails to be fun.


Quick summary of the background:

The franchise started with the movie Stargate, which postulated the idea that, thousands of years ago, an evil alien, posing as the god Ra, kidnapped a lot of humans to another planet via a teleporting stargate; in the modern day, an archaeologist and a military man free them.

You can ignore the movie -- the relevant bits get recapped in the first series.

Then came the series Stargate: SG-1. This reveals that there wasn't one stargate -- instead, they are scattered all over the galaxy, put there by a long-ago Ancient alien race. Ra was merely one of the evil Gou'auld parasites, who have transported and enslaved humans on many planets.

SG-1 is completely delightful: not the hardest SF ever, but a good, smart story about a small Earth team first learning about the galaxy around them, and eventually taking the fight to the Gou'auld. It somehow manages to make it plausible that, over the span of eight years, Earth goes from discovering the existence of aliens to leading a galactic alliance. It's tense at times, but always imaginative and optimistic.

Then came Stargate: Atlantis. An Earth team discover Atlantis -- it just happens to be on a planet halfway across the galaxy, threatened by nasty vampire things. It's not as brilliant as SG-1, but it's good middle of the road science fiction.


That brings us to Stargate: Universe. A human scientific base winds up dialing through a stargate halfway across the universe -- not merely the usual tens of thousands of light years, but billions of light years away. They wind up aboard an ancient starship named Destiny, trying to survive and figure out a way to get home.

Yes, comparisons to Star Trek: Voyager are kind of apt, but there are differences, both good and bad.

On the one hand, they can actually talk to home relatively frequently (via a mechanism established in the previous series), so they're not quite so isolated. This is a mixed blessing, since it means that they have to deal with the military and politicians back home, but it introduces some interesting nuances.

But ultimately, the problem with SG:U is that it is utterly, unrelentingly, grim.

This is a tale about a fairly small community (90ish people at the beginning, but not everyone makes it) trying to survive in an unforgiving environment. The Destiny is a large, fast, powerful ship, but they are constantly fighting to find enough food, water, air and power to keep going, in a galaxy that has no other humans in it and lots of aliens who don't like humans very much. (Including, in season two, a "race" of drones that are basically Saberhagen's Berserkers, out to kill all life other than the long-dead species that created them.)

Worse, there's a persistent stylistic choice of presenting hope and then snatching it away. We have a tragedy that is somewhat leavened by what seems to perhaps be a mystical miracle -- which two subsequent episodes undercut and show it had to all be imaginary. Two of our main characters have their true loves essentially killed off three times (super-science stuff). Our heroes discover an enormous trove of knowledge, only to have it destroyed before they manage to extract the one bit of data that they really need.

It goes on like that. The characters absolutely learn and grow, some of them quite well, and gradually begin to cohere as a forced-together family, but by the end of season two basically everybody is deeply traumatized, walking wounded both physically and emotionally. The only people who get a more or less happy ending are an alternate-timeline version of the crew.

The series was prematurely cancelled after two seasons, leaving things on a bit of a cliffhanger, and I want to be able to regret that. The stories were often interesting, and some of the writing and acting quite good.

But ultimately, I can't regret the cancellation, because the show is just plain exhausting. Moments of joy are rare; most episodes, the best the crew can celebrate is surviving long enough to keep going, even while they know that the ship, fast as it is, can never actually get them back home.

So -- not a recommendation, I'm afraid: even for Stargate completists like me, it just doesn't pay off enough to be worth the time. I'd like to believe that would have changed if they'd gotten a full seven-season run, and been able to tell the full story, which looked like it was trying to tell the origin of the universe itself. But the moral is that you can't tell a story that will only be good eventually -- it has to provide at least some enjoyment from early on...

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redbird: full bookshelves and table in a library (books)
([personal profile] redbird Sep. 3rd, 2025 07:11 pm)
[personal profile] cattitude and [personal profile] adrian_turtle finished reading The Prisoner of Zenda--the original swash-buckling Ruritanian romance-- aloud to me and each other. We all had a lot of fun with it. We may (or may not) go back and read the sequel at some point, but not right away.

I also read The Birding Dictionary, by Rosemary Mosco: a humor book about bird and bird-watching, in the format of a dictionary. Cattitude, who borrowed this from the library, seemed to find it funnier than I did.

Current reading:

The Winged Histories, by Sofia Samatar. This is eight loosely connected stories, each with a different narrator. I'm enjoying it, but having trouble settling in to read much at a time. The ebook is now overdue at the library, so I am carefully not synching my kindle until I finish reading it.
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
([personal profile] redbird Sep. 3rd, 2025 06:22 pm)
Governor Healey has overridden the CDC restrictions, and authorized pharmacists to give the covid vaccine to everyone over the age of 5 (younger children will have to get it from their pediatricians).

I heard about this first from my state senator's office: I emailed over the weekend to ask him to work on fixing this, so his staff knew I was interested. There's an article in the Globe, but pay-walled: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/03/metro/healey-covid-booster-massachusetts-trump-kennedy-vaccine/
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
([personal profile] redbird Sep. 3rd, 2025 06:12 pm)
First: we're all fine.

I got a phone call this afternoon from someone at the company we rent a storage unit from. She was calling to tell me that a construction crew doing something on the lot next door had last control of one of their machines, which breached the wall of our storage unit.

She was calling to tell me that, and to ask my permission to cut the lock on the door, so they can go inside and move everything to an undamaged unit. She wanted that ASAP, so they can start work tomorrow at 7 a.m.

I was on the bus when my phone rang, so while I could give her my approval right away, when she asked for my drivers license/state ID number, I told het I'd call her back, the information was hard to read on a moving bus

So, our plans for tomorrow now involve getting up early(ish) and going to Medford to look things over, and so the company can give us keys for the new lock.

I'm glad the phone was in my pocket when she called: otherwise I might not have noticed and listened to the voicemail before their office closed for the day.
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([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll Sep. 3rd, 2025 10:23 am)
Both of Premee's cats have been found and returned.
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([personal profile] finch Sep. 2nd, 2025 08:15 pm)

[tumblr.com profile] ficwip posted: The Fic That Haunts You

The Fic That Haunts You is a 3-month event challenging us to make progress on fics we think about a lot but, for some reason, never work on. We'll attempt to get past this by identifying exactly what's getting in our way & making plans to get past it.

Look, I'm really bad at doing more than one thing at a time and I know this about myself.

"Then why did you sign up for this second thing?" you may ask, because I'm kind of asking myself that.

Except... well, I read the description and I know exactly what the Fic that Haunts Me is. It's the novel I've listed as my theoretical project for NaNoWriMo half a dozen times. The thing I've been trying to rewrite since 2010 or so. It's Puzzles. It's always Puzzles. And I've tried to write the first chapter or two at least four times, and never gotten past that. Read more... )

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