What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

[Brian Peacock]

Just finished quite a good read by first time writer Lindsey Ellis called Axiom's End. An interesting tale set in an alternative 2007 and mapped against the events of the time, like the coming financial crisis and the Bush presidency, and filtered through a plethora of deep state conspiracies over government mind-wipe tech and a long-standing secret first contact with an alien species. I'm not going to say any more because it's a surprisingly thoughtful book with some interesting quirks, changes of pace, and pretty nifty twists.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Axioms-End-Lin ... 1597083530

[L'Emmerdeur]

Proceeding through the excellent America's Constitution: A Biography.

This is one of those volumes that needs two bookmarks. One for the text and one for the endnotes, which are unquestionably worth reading.

[Svartalf]

Going again through the original Conan stories... and I'm noticing that either Howard was more of a hack than I generally credit him for, or the edition I have is exceptionally bad.... lots of typing mistakes, some wrong words and editing flubs... I just wonder if that's the way Weird Tales readers got it, or if the mistakes are more recent.

[rainbow]

The Idiot.

[Svartalf]

Thyey already wrote a biography of frump?

[rainbow]

Thyey already wrote a biography of frump?

Dostoevsky's Idiot is the opposite of Trump, and a stable genius in comparison.

[Svartalf]

I know, just couldn't help making that dig.

[macdoc]

I've discovered https://www.chirpbooks.com/home

Daily deals and some are flat out wonderful and less than Audible when a deal comes up.



currently this for lovers of dystonian fiction....this is very well crafted



This was very well done and I learned some stuff

[Sean Hayden]

I'm rereading a few books...only the first section of the last one.



This is a quick read packed with interesting personal anecdotes and scientific discovery.



You'll get tired of his infatuation with the Greeks after the first few chapters. But I've never encountered his approach to the subject elsewhere, and besides, I like a bit of history.



Rereading Volume I. "Motion, Sound & Heat" This is not a textbook, but if you've taken even an intro to physics this compliments what you've learned nicely; which is useful, if you're like me and you just like learning this stuff but will never work with it. Asimov is an excellent teacher.

[Brian Peacock]

Love the cover of the Asimov I've never read any of his science writing, though he was quite prolific in that area.

I'm just coming to the end of Cixin Lui's science fiction trilogy The Three Body Problem. I really can't recommend it highly enough. It takes the Chinese tradition of the multi-generational historical narrative and pushes it from a starting point round about now and sets it off into the future. It starts with the history of a single person during the Cultural Revolution and progress with a series of events which brings the story up to the present as it branches, blossoms and blooms into a rich tapestry that decorates the arc of future history Lui creates. In the final book those events, characters and histories are re-examined from the perspective of the end of tale, which imaginatively closes the loop of the narrative and encapsulates the 'world' Lui has created in such a was as to bind all the books, their characters and events, together within a structure that, by the end, can be read in either direction - from here forward, or from then backwards. The tale is also quite unusual in the way that, for reasons of plot, the progress of science stops at the point we have now, so unlike the vast majority of future-orientated science fiction there's little to no reliance on imaginatively concocting future technology based on imaginatively concocted future science -- what I call Engineering Fantasy, you know, faster than light travel, teleportation, cyborgism etc. This means that technologically the stories explore what humans could achieve with what we know and have at the moment. And in a time when the vast majority of science fiction has a decidedly distopian edge its nice to read something that ultimately looks toward a more utopian vision of the future in the tradition of the stuff from the 50s, 60s, and 70s that drew me to the genre in the first place.

[macdoc]

Yeah 3 Body was a treat.

Try



as a segue.

[JimC]

I do like my military books. I just re-read "Fortune Favours the Brave" by A. J. Barker, detailing one of the final battles in the Korean war from the point of view of a British battalion which bore the brunt of human wave attacks by Chinese "volunteers".

Now, I've just started to re-read "The Tunisian Campaign" by Charles Messenger, about a relatively little known WW2 campaign in North Africa.

[macdoc]

Good source for audio books...daily deals - nice interface
https://www.chirpbooks.com/home

[Sean Hayden]

...on the difference between the Scientific Revolution and scientific revolutions

On the other hand, one may strike at the heart of many conceptual mixups by asking--for some reason, it is rarely asked--whether the Scientific Revolution should be counted as one of those scientific revolutions that are distinguished by those who uphold the revolutionary advance of science over time. If the answer is an unqualified yes, the Scientific Revolution stands to lose the unique character on which the historian insist. But if no, it is very odd that the most incisive upheaval that has ever taken place in science is not counted as a revolution. There is a paradox here, which is hard to unravel. Scientific revolutions may peacefully flow on like waves on the surface of the river of science all across the landscape of the past, only to mesh, and often to clash, with the Scientific Revolution when crossing the 17th century. Or is it rather the case that science did not acquire a revolutionary character until the emergence of early modern science, so that the Scientific Revolution stands at the origin of an untold number of subsequent scientific revolutions?

--sorry for the long quote, but this killed me. I had to share it. Is the Scientific Revolution just another revolution? You can imagine his excitement...

...and the paradox!

The Scientific Revolution, A Historiographical Inquiry. H. Floris Cohen

[Tero]

I'm reading a history of the Baltic countries. The index is rather poor, and there are 2-3 maps of any use. There is no entry for Ingria:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria
It's a made up region where Finnish speakers were shoved under Sweden and Russia. It neighbors Estonia.