“There are Kissi as pale and tenuous as vapor from a car exhaust. They whisper lies into people’s ears. Slip hotel receipts into a husband’s wallet. A phone number into a wife’s jacket pocket. They merrily plant little cells of paranoia that grow like a melanoma, because what’s more fun at this time of year than a holiday family slaughter?
I have to get off the street. I can’t stand looking at this. Regular people are bad enough, but regular people being made worse by chaos-sucking bottom feeders is something I can’t take right now.”
Finally finished A Memory called Empire last night. It was thoroughly absorbing, and I’m looking forward to reading A desolation called Peace, when it comes out.The appendix describing how to pronounce the various cultures came as somewhat of a surprise to me. The two human cultures-- Teixcalaan and Lsel both seemed alien to me, though perhaps Teixcalaan is less so.
Jacqueline Susann’s “Once is Not Enough”. Since she was basically an urban anthropologist - observing her peers and writing it down as fiction - it’s a fascinating look at the “jet-set” POV of the early 1970s. With all the names changed to protect the innocent AND the guilty, lol.
More fuckery. I wanted to send someone a copy of Alice in Wonderland, so I went to get a copy from the archive. Everything there by Lewis Carroll, 488 texts, is now part of the lending library. There is nothing downloadable. Without a doubt, some of those works should be public domain.
I’ve started a new series of scifi/future history books by Dirk Walvoord. It’s called The Andy Series. It’s a group of (so far) eight long stories or novelettes set in the near future, when AIs are actually AI and androids indistinguishable from humans exist, and are commercially available. Most of them are lower-level-intelligence servant- and sex-bots, but there exist a few next-gen higher-intelligence androids that run things and pass as human in society. The book series is actively under development; new books come out every couple of months, and he’s just released the eighth one.
The series explores the personal interactions between the androids and humans, and deals with some of the societal and individual psychological issues we’ll have to deal with as we move into that world. It’s vaguely similar, in concept anyway, to the robots in Asimov’s Robots and Foundation series, had Asimov been better at the human side of things.
This is probably not a good read for children or younger teenagers. There’s a good bit of sex, some rather graphic, and some kink as well. It fits into the story though; I’m quite sure that sex- and companion-bots will be one of the first uses of this technology when it comes.
The entire series is currently about eight bucks US on Amazon, and is also available for free under their Kindle Unlimited program.
Well, you can with some titles, but with certain titles at that particular time, I definitely couldn’t. I suppose that someone else could have had the titles in question checked out for 14 days at the time, which is why only one hour was available to me at the time. If I wait til later, maybe I can get the two weeks, so I shouldn’t complain.
But reference books I used to use have completely disappeared.
I would say pretty good. It’s inventive. There’s a lot of academia stuff that is fun. There are two point of view characters, and the teenage one feels a bit try-hard. It comes together in the end, but there’s some jaggedness associated with a middle aged woman writing teens.
This was silly and vapid, but goes down easy. You can tell every beat in it from. The first page, but I’ll read the third book in the series no problem. Like eating a third helping of popcorn at a movie.
