Reading Material

[Irrev-Black]

https://www.freesfonline.net/NewAdditions.html - Has SF stories from ancient times, up till now.

[Irrev-Black]

John Birmingham is one of those influences who help me pass for sane some days.

His social commentary is surgical-sharp, but tickles, and his fiction is also quite acceptable.

Speaking of which, he just teased his readers with a vignette from a possible novel -

https://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/the-collector

- to which I just say, "please hurry up, publish, and take my money!"

[Irrev-Black]

Charles Stross is a fine writer of fiction.

His blog goes into the thought surrounding the writing, and of course takes in Stross's obervations on his own thought processes, as well as his musings on the times, circumstances, and environment.

His commenters, too, are folk who think deeply. There's an education in about half-a-dozen fields to be found in just one post.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-s ... .html#more

[stylofone]

Charles Stross is a fine writer of fiction.

Some of his guidelines about his fiction cross over into real life and politics. Eugenicist billionaires believe in a lot of ridiculous things because they want to own them, to buy them. It is a sort of self-worshipping religion, so mentioning his atheism makes sense in this context

I'm allergic to kitsch Americana, especially Westerns, am a singularity skeptic and atheist in real life, expect FTL travel and/or time travel to prove impossible, ditto mind uploading and "true" general artificial intelligence, and strongly suspect the answer to the Fermi paradox is that our kind of tool-using intelligent life is vanishingly rare in the cosmos. Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization.

[stylofone]

I normally ignore the street libraries that people put around the place, but the other day I perused one and found a fantastic early 70s psychedelic book from the olden days of the Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal magazine. I kind of fell in love with it and had to take it home. I went back to the same park today and before leaving I remembered to look through my shelf for an equivalent book to replace it with. I have two copies of Maus by Art Spiegelman so I deposited one of them... I feel like I have put back more than I took out, measured in cultural weight.

LoneSloane.jpg (211.81 KiB) Viewed 2362 times

Sorry, photo is blurry, but it's "Lone Sloane Delirius" by Philippe Druillet, with many excerpts available online.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lone+sloane&i ... &ia=images

[Irrev-Black]

A nearly complete digital library of Whole Earth publications—including the famed Whole Earth Catalog founded 55 years ago by counterculture icon Stewart Brand—has been made available online for the first time. A curious reader can now flip through all the old catalogs, magazines, and journals right in their web browser, or download entire issues to their computer free of charge.

The Whole Earth Catalog was the proto-blog—a collection of reviews, how-to guides, and primers on anarchic libertarianism printed onto densely packed pages. It carried the tagline “Access to Tools” and offered know-how, product reviews, cultural analysis, and gobs of snark, long before you could get all that on the internet.

Be still, my ancient hippie heart!

https://www.wired.com/story/whole-earth ... t-archive/

[stylofone]

Keep reading if you can, fight against the forces of distraction and the ripoffs of the attention economy! They want you dumb, they want you compliant.

The vouchers idea in this article doesn't matter to me because I get my books electronically for free by fair means or foul.

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/gr ... 5eit4.html

I just finished Gloriana by Michael Moorcock (a rare thumbs down from this Moorcock fan). I'm now into Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, filling in the gaps in my classic SF knowledge. So far it is great, verging on psychedelic, although I don't think that word was around in 1937.

(opens wikipedia tab) Yes, the word "psychedelic" was first used in 1957.

[stylofone]

I'm not having a lot of luck with my book choices at the moment. I had to grind through the last bit of the alleged SF Masterwork "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon. I don't think I'll bother with "Last and First Men". You can see how Stapledon was an influence on Arthur C Clarke, but that was in the 30s, and it hasn't aged well since then IMO. I slagged it off on Bookwyrm.

https://ramblingreaders.org/user/AvonVi ... ous-waffle

To keep my reading mojo going, I am going to hop back into music writing, and read "Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984" by Simon Reynolds. This week I also watched the documentary "Beautiful Noise" about the shoegaze music genre, so I'm up for a bit more stylistic exegesis.

[stylofone]

I'm reading the Gormenghast so-called trilogy. It is actually my second attempt. I think I've reached escape velocity this time. I'm 10% into Titus Groan and loving it.