For me it can be more distracting to read a 1980s book in which gosh wow we have ethnicity and sexuality and so on and we’ll talk about it at length, than a 1950s book in which everyone’s a straight white man (even the women) so it just never gets memtioned.
Of course I have the privilege of being able to ignore reoresentation, and these days I can also read books in which characters in positions of authority not being cishet white men is not regarded as remarkable.
Dr Cox: “The women are men, the children are men, the men of course… MEN.”
Oh Scrubs. So funny at the time, so problematic in retrospect.
I recently read some 1950s sci-fi, and gosh, it’s a hard read. I get what you’re saying, but there is often a lot of “Over here we have all the normal people, and over THERE are all the horrible freaks that do things like have piercings and tattoos and eat their own babies.”
I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. I get where you’re coming from. And there is definitely a sense of comfort in some things being unstated because they didn’t “need” to be stated. But then you get into the rabbit hole of “There are only two genders: male and political. There are only two sexual orientations: straight and political. There are only two races: white and political…”
ANYWAY! This takes up more brain space than it does for most because I write these stories, and so I have to be constantly conscious of "Okay, did I mention this character’s skin tone because it matters, or because I think it’s unusual? If I say that character has “skin like rich chocolate,” did I also describe that character as having “skin like fresh milk”? And so on.
Firm believer that representation matters, but yeah. I get what you’re saying. I suppose I just want writers to be conscious of the choices they’re making.
Anyway.
I read a lot these last weeks. Especially on vacation.
Sometimes I get the urge to reread Honor Harrington by David Weber. But I only read the most exciting parts of the books nowadays, so it is really fast 
Beside that:
Skysworn book 4 of Cradle by Will Wight. A friend told me the first four books are more or less setup and the series really starts going in book 5, which is kinda amazing to me because I already like the series a lot. Book 4 admittedly had a really weird pacing and the function as setup for later books was very clear. But the books are short and just fun to read.
The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin. A friend recommended this trilogy to me and I read the first two books which I enjoyed a lot. They are not very long, so I was surprised by the amount of worldbuilding which went into them. There are some narrative twists I found enticing too though I guessed a lot of things correctly. That didn’t take away from my enjoyment, I am just wondering if my guess for the plot of the third book (in a very rough understanding) is correct 
That makes me put it a bit lower on my next to read list, but excited to find out how the journey ends when I get around to it.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. That was an interesting and weird book. Not in a bad way but very unexpected. It is about necromancers in an Agatha Christie mystery setup. It includes science fiction, fantasy, horror and romance elements. Curious about book 2…
Golden Son by Pierce Brown. The second book in the Red Rising series and it was great. Very action packed with a lot of twists. Very entertaining Looking forward to the end of this trilogy.
Maybe I should finish one of the series instead of starting new things, but the Malazan (re)read on Reddit continues with Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson and I have to join that. Malazan is just amazing, love an excuse to read the books again. Also a slower and denser book, a great contrast to all these books I read the last weeks.
Yeah, Glynn Stewart suffers from this. Some people are brown or black, some are unnaturally pale, and some don’t get a description at all.
If you found GtN weird, HtN is much weirder. But great.
I found NtN (book 3) less weird but it took me a lot longer to work out what was going on compared to HtN, which I got almost instantly. Probably because I read the first two closer together. [Very vague kinda spoilers for HtN and NtN]
The twist at the end of book 1 with Gideon dying totally threw me off but looking at the title of book 2 I could have expected that I guess.
I liked it and it made me instantly interested in book 2
So far I think I love Gideon best but I’ve enjoyed all of them. I particularly like the way Gideon takes on the form and some of the tropes of the YA stereotyped factions-in-deadly-competition that one sees a lot post The Hunger Games and then completely subverts them.
The Absolute Book - Elizabeth Knox - Amateurish drivel. Paper-thin characters, plot points dropped and picked up on a whim, large sections that are entirely pointless in a book that’s 600+ pages long, anti-climactic ending. And one of my bug bears are novels where the protagonist is an author. This book takes it even further to include every reference to a book you could possibly think of - libraries, book tours, book festivals, folklore and mythology, book burnings, miscellaneous things that destroy books. Utterly tiresome fan fiction - how did this ever get published?! 1/5
This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Well written, and starts well, but ultimately goes nowhere. The plot massively loses its way and forsakes any creativity for banal cliche contrivances. Was convinced I would love it after the first half, but the second half throws any hope off a cliff and tramples on the corpse. I’m not enough of a romantic to enjoy aimless love letters unfortunately. And please stop using Romeo and Juliet references (unless it’s about Tybalt and Mercutio - more references to them please). 2/5
Now reading Women Talking - Miriam Toews. Really enjoying it so far. The characters are beautifully written (even if they do fall into the “two characters clearly designed to dichotomise an argument” trope). Reminds me of John Steinbeck and Harper Lee in it’s writing. Surprised me how it lays out the entire premise on the first few pages rather than saving it as a twist, but the set up of starting the story at a critical stage halfway through the narrative, with the novel presented in the style of meeting minutes, works really well.
In a way it sort of is, but from a technical point of view, no it isn’t.
The conceit that Hari Seldon can calculate future outcomes is based in physics and determinism, but, we can’t calculate the outcome of the events faster than the universe ages. If one could have a way of calculating the universe faster than the passage of time, then psychohistory could be achievable.
For more on determinism, see this video by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder that discusses free will. You may not like or be comfortable with determinism, but it’s what the physics suggests.
Nice! Thanks for that
Oh my goodness thank you, I loved this video. I mean obviously I had no choice but to love it. Thank you! Have subscribed to Dr. Hossenfelder’s channel as this was a great explanation. Thank you!
Ooh, to add to the ‘What are you reading?’ Discussion, I’ve just bought Dr Hossenfelder’s book, Existential Physics.
Of late she has got sucked into “trans is scary and bad” but her older material is still decent.
Oh rats, that’s a shame. Flipping heck.
I got that a while back, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Not really, Roger, more she has been a voice of reason, as in here’s the science.
In her first video on Trans athletes, she basically said if a mtf had gone through puberty and then transitioned they’d have more muscle mass and it would take several years for their body to loose that advantage.
The second video on numbers, basically debunked the scare promoted by conservative talking heads, but did point out that more women were transitioning, which given that women are treated less fairly in our world than men is not that surprising.
I wouldn’t call her out as a transphobe, but Hossenfelder’s rhetoric definitely falls outside the lines of just “here’s the science.” By framing arguments like rapid-onset gender dysphoria as “maybe it’s true, maybe not,” and trying to meet exactly in the middle of two endpoints, she’s not just providing a sound byte for transphobes to leap onto and devour, she’s also paving the way for well-meaning people to fall on the wrong side of the issue. ROGD is a completely made-up phenomenon, a real-life Russell’s teapot of transphobic pseudoscience, but she gives it far more legitimacy than it deserves. And that uncertainty will make some people and some parents scared that they’re doing the wrong thing, under the pretense of “the science just isn’t all there yet.” Which is an understandable viewpoint to reach after watching her videos, but it’s still a wrong one, and fueling that fire is arguably as dangerous as outright transphobia.
It’s more “here’s the science I believe in, let’s misrepesent it, and ignore the rest”. I have not watched the video on trans athletes, but I did watch part of the trans as social fad video, and it gets off to a horrible start, and it doesn’t get much better. It’s probably not enough to get her into the American republican party, (she doesn’t seem able to deny the existence of trans people, nor that they suffer abuse, after all). but it’s not anything approaching ’voice of reason’. (Quoting a study so bad the publishing journal apologized for it, without bringing that up?)
I can’t tell if she’s just underinformed, or if she is heading into the cuckoo land of aged physicists.
@ dscheidt I can see how one might end up taking away that message. I didn’t, but that’s me.
With social media being funded by tech bros. this leads Inevitably to the enshittification on social media.
Her having a Patron means she is asked all sort of questions, and I would agree that she was definitely talking outside her wheelhouse, which I think is unfortunate.
@ acharlie1377I think your argument is hyperbole. Science never proves something right, only fails to disprove the theory. Her background will means she will always fall into that perspective, which is why, as I said to Roger, I think it was unfortunate she addressed the topic.
As for the pretense “the science just isn’t all there yet,” I would have to agree with Sabine on this matter. Not saying ROGD etc is valid, it most certainly isn’t, but the sample sizes for transgender studies are small, and like a lot of science, what has been found has been hard to replicate.
Which in no way suggests that I would support any anti-trans bigotry. Anymore than I would tolerate any anti-gay bigotry, or racial bigotry.
As for being scared of doing the wrong thing, this is the human condition writ large. We evolved to react to things that scare us, and avoid them.