Wednesday Reading Meme for Sept 11 2024
Sep. 11th, 2024 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishSept 11 2024
What I’ve Read:
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Oh, man, this is delightfully weird.
Spoilers ahead!
So the first book in the series started with a terraformed world, an unexpected disaster on earth, and an opportunistic species that wasn’t intended to get a boost in evolution to human level intelligence and cooperation actually getting that boost and becoming the dominant species on the planet.
In the background, humans from earth flailed around and tried to figure out how to live somewhere else, but failed, and basically were all set to commit genocide in order to get enough of the liveable planet to survive. It has an unexpectedly positive ending where cooperation and Science! win the day, and humans and spiders live in harmony enough to build an exploratory space program together.
The second book looks at a different terraforming team that landed on a different planet and what happened to them during the Big Disaster that ended Earth’s run to space – in this case, they land on a world with actual factual alien life to deal with, and pivot to terraforming an entirely different world in order to provide a safe haven for that alien life to develop on its own. Like the first book, humanity goes thru a HARD bottleneck and actually, the worst happens, everyone dies, and the species that survives on the terraformed world is a bunch of hyper-intelligent octopuses, and they are So Delightfully Weird. They are volatile and have a completely weird de-centralized neurology, so they have intuition and quick action as a main tenent of their civilization and it’s wild to figure out how these people managed to survive each other. The alien life takes the form of a slime mold that is straight out of a horror movie about invasive fungus (and actually reminds me a lot of the way demons in Penric and Desdemona are described) that relies on the cognitive function of the humans it invades for understanding – its so weird and functionally more akin to the character that is a computer program saved from a human personality template
This book was so fucking weird and fun and horrifying and so so hopeful – the spider civilization’s connection to humans makes a deeply interesting connection which is that their chief export to the galaxy is going to be COOPERATION and UNDERSTANDING of each other, and I found all of the characters (human and spider and octopus and even the sentient slime mold) to be incredibly compelling and so weird. I loved this book. I’m going to the next one eventually but I’m taking a short break first to chew on it.
What I’m Reading
She Who Became the Sun – Xing book club – Re-reading as an audio book. This is a fascinatingly gendery book and the vibe was so interesting that I actually started a C-Drama to keep the feeling going – I’m watching Nirvana in Fire, which I have absorbed a great deal of via fic. (I do not speak Chinese, the dubbed version would have been fine for me but Viki keeps shutting down when I click that version so we’re on subtitles. )
Paladin’s Grace - Re-Read – As seems to be the case, I have read this before and picked this up in audiobook form to fall asleep to, which is working nicely, but then it gets actually too engrossing and I end up listening to it ahead of things. It starts in a fascinating place, but is very much about two people with a lot of trauma being deeply horny for each other and trying to be decent to themselves and each other while they figure their shit out.
Back Burner
Ash: A Secret History –
Paladin’s Grace
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet
What I’ll Read Next
Murderbot #5 -Network Event – Xing Book Club
What I’ve Read:
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Oh, man, this is delightfully weird.
Spoilers ahead!
So the first book in the series started with a terraformed world, an unexpected disaster on earth, and an opportunistic species that wasn’t intended to get a boost in evolution to human level intelligence and cooperation actually getting that boost and becoming the dominant species on the planet.
In the background, humans from earth flailed around and tried to figure out how to live somewhere else, but failed, and basically were all set to commit genocide in order to get enough of the liveable planet to survive. It has an unexpectedly positive ending where cooperation and Science! win the day, and humans and spiders live in harmony enough to build an exploratory space program together.
The second book looks at a different terraforming team that landed on a different planet and what happened to them during the Big Disaster that ended Earth’s run to space – in this case, they land on a world with actual factual alien life to deal with, and pivot to terraforming an entirely different world in order to provide a safe haven for that alien life to develop on its own. Like the first book, humanity goes thru a HARD bottleneck and actually, the worst happens, everyone dies, and the species that survives on the terraformed world is a bunch of hyper-intelligent octopuses, and they are So Delightfully Weird. They are volatile and have a completely weird de-centralized neurology, so they have intuition and quick action as a main tenent of their civilization and it’s wild to figure out how these people managed to survive each other. The alien life takes the form of a slime mold that is straight out of a horror movie about invasive fungus (and actually reminds me a lot of the way demons in Penric and Desdemona are described) that relies on the cognitive function of the humans it invades for understanding – its so weird and functionally more akin to the character that is a computer program saved from a human personality template
This book was so fucking weird and fun and horrifying and so so hopeful – the spider civilization’s connection to humans makes a deeply interesting connection which is that their chief export to the galaxy is going to be COOPERATION and UNDERSTANDING of each other, and I found all of the characters (human and spider and octopus and even the sentient slime mold) to be incredibly compelling and so weird. I loved this book. I’m going to the next one eventually but I’m taking a short break first to chew on it.
What I’m Reading
She Who Became the Sun – Xing book club – Re-reading as an audio book. This is a fascinatingly gendery book and the vibe was so interesting that I actually started a C-Drama to keep the feeling going – I’m watching Nirvana in Fire, which I have absorbed a great deal of via fic. (I do not speak Chinese, the dubbed version would have been fine for me but Viki keeps shutting down when I click that version so we’re on subtitles. )
Paladin’s Grace - Re-Read – As seems to be the case, I have read this before and picked this up in audiobook form to fall asleep to, which is working nicely, but then it gets actually too engrossing and I end up listening to it ahead of things. It starts in a fascinating place, but is very much about two people with a lot of trauma being deeply horny for each other and trying to be decent to themselves and each other while they figure their shit out.
Back Burner
Ash: A Secret History –
Paladin’s Grace
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet
What I’ll Read Next
Murderbot #5 -Network Event – Xing Book Club
