I’m nearly finished reading John M Ford’s Growing Up Weightless, which is a charming Bildungsroman story where the protagonist is playing games and planning on a trip to the farside of the moon (by train, it’s SF).
4 Likes
I am also APPALLED that I don’t have one of those!!!
we have been listening to the audio during our roadtrip and have entered the Iron Tangle yesterday.
2 Likes
Just finished a Dan Abnett + friend thing I picked up years ago, called Fiefdom. Apparently it’s a sequel of sorts to a graphic novel series he did for 2000AD, called Kingdom. The story features uplifted dogs who were charged with keeping Them off the Master’s Lawn, which is a lovely concept, but it’s been hundreds of years and an ice age came, so now they’re living in tunnels. Unfortunately the story is quite repetitive, with a lot of similar conversations about “Them are coming back” > “No, shut up.” and several quite similar fights, and neither the culture of the uplifts nor the characters get much development once the initial picture is painted.
I had a look at the graphic novels’ storyline, and it sounds rather a downer too, so this is probably just not for me. Love the general concept though and wondering if I can work into into a RPG…
5 Likes
Not similar per se, but that makes me think of the Kirsten Bakis novel “Lives of the Monster Dogs”.
2 Likes
There’s Pugmire (now Realms of Pugmire), which is a far, far post-apocalypse fantasy of uplifted animals. The dogs believe that they must strive to be Good Dogs and worship their long vanished masters, while the cats believe that men were their servants.
6 Likes
I mean, it’s not like they’re wrong…
8 Likes
Every dog I’ve ever met has repeated the same yap-yap-yapping, so that might just be what uplifted dogs are like. Not the greatest conversationalists.
4 Likes
Surely, once the canine nation is finally able to get across the message that it is hungry, actually, communication in general will improve.
4 Likes
Also just finished another British Library Tales of the Weird, this time Randalls Round (sic). A mixed bag with some interesting bits. Review here: Librarians & Leviathans: Reviewish: Randalls Round
1 Like
There’s a sci-fi book about sentient pack animals that behave somewhat dog-like… antipodes, I think, but I might be mixing my sci-fi…
“A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vinge… and apparently, “Tines” not Antipodes. Anyway. It’s slightly bewildering, but quite good!
4 Likes
My Librarianship degree had a module on statistics. Our lecturer gave us ‘How to Lie with Statistics’ (Huff, 1954) as a core text. It’s a wonderful read on misrepresentation, misinformation, and graphical lies.
How to Lie with Statistics - Wikipedia is a good introduction, and tracking down the PDF on the internet is left as an exercise for the reader.
6 Likes
Just about halfway through Season of Skulls - the last (so far) of the New Management books by Charles Stross (which are the second series of books in his Laundry Files series … it’s a bit complicated.)
It’s a good read, and I re-read the previous two just beforehand to ready myself for it. Though I note that because he wrote these three before his final Laundry Files book - The Regicide Report - even though they come after it in the chronology - there are a few interesting contradictions between the books.
5 Likes