I'm re-reading all of Iain Banks' works, and it seems like his hostility toward organized religion is blunter than usual in his earlier books. In "Against a Dark Background", allegedly drafted when he was in his 20s, he's particularly comically dismissive ("...buncha religious fuckwits.", "humourless hysterical dickshits" etc etc).

And books like"Phlebas" and "Games" cast religious groups/cults/theocracies as villains, while other early works constantly drop anti religious asides ("Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present..." - "State of the Art").

I haven't started re-reading his later novels, so maybe he maintains this blunt trend to the end. A large part of me suspects he does (20-year-old and 50-year-old Banks seems to maintain the same politics).

Anyway, curious about if he ever talked about religion outside his novels, I came across a (customarily funny and Scottish) interview he did with New Humanist Magazine (https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/qa-iain-banks/), excerpted below for those interested:

HM: In 1996, when you were first interviewed by New Humanist, you described yourself as an “evangelical atheist”. Has anything made you change your mind?

IB: Nope. In these trying, troubled times, I think it’s even more important to keep on making a proper fuss about refusing to buy into all this “religion” bollocks.

HM: In your latest novel Stonemouth, the protagonist Stewart, feels “embarrassed for us as a species” that we continue to need religion. Is this a fair reflection of your own view?

IB: It is. Homo Sapiens’ middle name is Gullible. No, really, it is.

HM: Human nature – are humans just animals as John Gray suggests, or, as Ray Tallis argues, does having a consciousness make us special?

IB: I think the statements are compatible, though I guess it depends how much work the word “just” is considered to be doing in the first one. We are unarguably animals, but just as there are profound differences in complexity and behaviour between, say, a flatworm and an ape, so there are profound differences in complexity and behaviour between the apes and us. In the end I’d side with Tallis and agree that having the sort of consciousness we have does, of course, make us different. It just doesn’t make us quite as different as some of us might like to think.

HM: Do you believe in moral progress?

IB: Cautiously, yes. It seems like a failure of both nerve and imagination not to. At worst, as something more to be aspired to than boasted about.

HM: Humanist, secularist, atheist, agnostic, freethinker, rationalist: which, if any of these, do you use to describe yourself?

IB: I am happy to sign up to all of them; the only caveat is with the “agnostic”. I’ve always felt that one ought to retain just the tiniest, sliveriest wee bit of agnosticism to season what is basically outright atheism, on the grounds that – in the end, after all – each of us is just a solitary smart ape on a piffling little planet in an ungraspably big universe, and the sheer bleeding obviousness of there being no supreme deity could itself be a huge cosmic joke on the part of a particularly annoying and mischievous god. It’s an admission that, well, you never entirely know. I maintain that this is close enough to absolute atheism as to make no damn difference.

HM: In your sci-fi civilisation The Culture, the ideas of transhumanism have come to pass – science has prolonged and enhanced life, religion has been eradicated, as has scarcity. Professor John Harris has argued that it is our moral duty to use science to enhance human life. Do you agree?

IB: In theory, yes. In practice I am not looking forward to the obscenely rich and powerful being the first to benefit from serious life prolongation. Imagining people like Rupert Murdoch dying, despite all that money, is one of my most innocent, if heartfelt, pleasures. But still, yes.

HM: You said you’d like to live in The Culture, but isn’t it the messy struggle, in which scarcity, crime and bad things are inevitable, that makes life worthwhile?

IB: No.

HM: Multiverse, String Theory, branes, parallel universes: what’s your current favourite explanation of the nature of the universe?

IB: My own. The whole concentric/nested universes thing (see Culture novels for details). Totally barmy, of course, but it’s mine.

HM: In Transition your characters “jaunt” though space. How were they able to do that?

IB: Ah. That is the multiverse theory, right there. I think. Or possibly the parallel universes thing. I recall being confused at the time. Patently I still am. When I’m asked this question “live”, as it were, I just keep waffling and waving my arms until people forget what the original question actually was. This, I am discovering, is harder in print. … So … Next question.

HM: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

IB: Short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. That way you get fewer nasty surprises but can still keep going. With a smile, a whistle and a general air of breeziness, natch.

HM: Much of the action in Stonemouth takes place when your characters are teenagers. How do you get into the minds of the young?

IB: Honestly I have no idea. By being still a bit childish myself? Never having had the responsibility of being a dad? Still listening to Radio One? Just listening, maybe; keeping an ear open for how people younger than I am express themselves. Other than that it’s just taking a punt and getting away with it. So far.

HM: In your books about the Culture you have created a hugely complex world. How do you keep track of it all?

IB: I have a document on my writing computer – cunningly entitled “Culture Facts” – that I refer to, and sometimes I have to look back through earlier Culture books. “Culture Facts” has grown rather a lot over the years; it’s beginning to look a bit fan-tastic itself. I only started it because I kept forgetting what colour the drones’ aura fields turn when they were being sarcastic and I got fed up having to leaf through the aforesaid earlier novels.

HM: Which whisky would you choose to celebrate with if it does?

IB: Laphroaig. It would be no time for half measures.

HM: You used to enjoy driving sports cars but you gave them up. How do you chillax now?

IB: Can’t be doing with “chillax”. Not sure what “relax” did to require being replaced. (Apologies – my inner curmudgeon coming out there.) Anyway, relaxed – if you will – is my normal state. If I want to get stressed I do something foolish like visit London. Other than that: “hillwalking” would be the more cooperative answer. Well, glenwalking. It’s like hillwalking except less strenuous. Also, I still have cars; it’s just there are only two now and they’re both small, diesel-powered and regularly achieve 60 mpg. In the old days, with the 911 Turbo and the M5 and such, it was a cause for some celebration to break the 20 mpg barrier. Also, having solar panels fitted to the roof of our house even as I type, and got my eye on an Ampera or a plug-in Pious – sorry Prius. So, more relatively green motoring fun to come, chums!

I came to SF through Foundation and Dune. What newer book would you put next to them, not because it copies the same ideas, but because it gives you that same feeling of discovering a much bigger world? Station Eleven stayed with me, although it’s a very different kind of book.

I just finished reading Foreigner, which is my fifth book of hers (Faded Sun trilogy, Cyteen) and I just can't get over how good she is. I feel like she doesn't get enough love. Obviously people who read sci-fi know and love her, but I feel like she should be in the Asimov, Le Guin, Heinlein, etc category where non sci-fi readers know her name. My review of Foreigner is here (but it has a lot of my thoughts about her in general):

I'm obsessed with Cherryh's style. She's so good at sci-fi.

She always starts pretty slow, which I've come to realize is a feature, not a bug. She does an incredible job of building not only a world, but a full alien culture through conversations and deliberations within characters' minds. There are no information dumps and very few purely descriptive passages, but you slowly start to piece together this new alien race and how they think as you experience the world through the main character's eyes. Her pacing is excellent. The plot moves slowly in the beginning, giving you time to really absorb the atevi culture, and then starts to pick up once you grasp the intricacies.

Nobody does political intrigue like Cherryh. The aforementioned slow start gave me as much information as I needed to be experiencing the plot right along with Bren (the main character). Based on what I had already learned about the atevi culture and their political system, I felt like I was in the intrigue myself. I was able to take the nuggets of information that Cherryh drops and try to put the pieces together myself. And this is a feeling I've had in other Cherryh books as well. Because I have this base of knowledge that she's prepared me with, I am not relying on her to guide me through the storyline. I really feel like I'm in the same boat as Bren, just trying to keep up and put together this fragmented information that I'm learning into something coherent. She uses a very strict third person limited viewpoint so all we know is what Bren is experiencing, adding to the immersion.

There's a scene in this book that rivals any tense conversation scene in media. I compare it to the classic example of the start of Inglorious Bastards and also one of my favorites, the dinner scene in Dune. This one was right up there with them. It's literally just a human and an alien sitting across a desk from each other, with little threat of physical violence, and it still had me on the edge of my seat.

I could talk about Cherryh forever. I haven't even talked about Bren's struggle with being a human representative trying desperately to relate to an alien species which does not operate on the same spectrum of emotion as we do. She's so good. My only critique so far of her, which holds her stars back a little bit, is that the endings are never really the best part of the book. They aren't bad endings by any means, but there is always such a long, intense buildup, and then they just resolve within the last several pages. I almost think her rising action phase is so good that it makes the endings feel dull in comparison. I can never really think of any specific complaints about the endings, but somehow it always feel like they don't quite live up to the absurd tension she builds in the middle of the book. She's so fun to read though. Truly gets my heart racing.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I'd love to hear any response to my thoughts, especially concerning the way she finishes her books. If I could learn something that I'm not currently appreciating about her endings, it'd open these books up to being perfect in my eyes. I'd also love to hear if you disagree about my placement of her in the upper echelon of sci-fi writers and why. I can't wait to read Downbelow Station, I just can't find a copy of it anywhere!

Edit to add: Also, if you disagree with my claim that "nobody does political intrigue like Cherryh" I'd be grateful to hear who you think rivals her, because chances are I also want to read that haha

I’ve just completed my 3rd read of this book by Neal Stephenson because nothing else satisfies that itch quite the way his books do. Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson was a good one too. Anyone have any recommends of books in the similar vein? I particularly like NS’s style of writing, the technical details and humour he sprinkles throughout.

Das war etwas ganz anderes … Ich hatte eine Geschichte über den Erstkontakt erwartet und mich auf interessante politische Entwicklungen und Dialoge gefreut. Stattdessen bekam ich etwas, das mich bis heute in vielerlei Hinsicht beschäftigt und beunruhigt. Ab der Hälfte des Buches bereitete es mir ziemliche Kopfschmerzen. Und das meine ich nicht negativ.

Die Außerirdischen werden die Overlords genannt. Sie werden von Karellen, dem neuen Administrator der Erde, angeführt. Er kommuniziert mit Stormgren (dem UN-Vorsitzenden). Er plant keine feindliche Übernahme, sondern eine friedliche Herrschaft. Über mehrere Jahrzehnte führen die Overlords die Menschheit in ein „goldenes Zeitalter“. Waffen, Armut, Krieg – alles wurde abgeschafft. Doch das blieb nicht ohne Folgen.

Die Menschen haben keine Probleme mehr: Jeder besitzt zwei Wohnsitze, es gibt keine Verbrechen mehr, die Menschen haben Freizeit im Überfluss. Dies führt zu einem Überangebot an Kunst, Forschung und Kultur.

Aber was soll man noch erforschen, wenn schon alles erforscht ist oder Forschung sinnlos ist, weil die Machthaber der Menschheit sowieso helfen? Was bringt es, kreativ zu sein, wenn alle Menschen Künstler sind? Führt das nicht zu einer Flut von Belanglosigkeiten?

„Die letzten Generationen“ handelt davon, wie die Menschheit in eine evolutionäre Sackgasse gerät. Es zeigt eine Leere: Eine Leere, die einst mit Kunstwerken, beeindruckender Architektur, fesselnder Literatur, Filmen, Musik und vielem mehr gefüllt war. Mit Projekten, die auf menschlichem Ehrgeiz basierten. Es ist der Schrecken dieser Leere, der mir Kopfschmerzen bereitet.

Und aus meiner Sicht ist diese Leere (oder besser gesagt, ihr Vorläufer) beunruhigend nah. Ich spreche hier von generativer KI.

KI überschwemmt bereits den Unterhaltungsmarkt und macht es zunehmend schwieriger, Inhalte zu filtern. Nachdem ich beispielsweise ein Buch beendet habe, suche ich oft auf YouTube nach verwandtem Material. Als ich nach einer „Analyse von Childhood’s End“ suchte, fand ich drei Videos mit KI-generierten Bildern und einer KI-synthetisierten Stimme, die einen offensichtlich ebenfalls KI-generierten Text vorlas. Ein Kanal veröffentlichte täglich mehrere solcher KI-produzierter Videos zu verschiedenen Büchern.

In diesem Zusammenhang fand ich es fast schon kurios, dass Clarke in seinem Buch 500 Stunden Radio- und Fernsehprogramm oder drei Stunden Sehkonsum pro Tag als übertrieben bezeichnete.

Heute werden täglich zwei Millionen Stunden Fernsehprogramm produziert, und der Durchschnittsmensch verbringt fast sieben Stunden täglich vor dem Smartphone-Bildschirm.

Eine andere Interpretation lautet, dass, wenn alle menschlichen Bedürfnisse befriedigt sind, kein Antrieb für Fortschritt mehr übrig ist. Ich möchte diese Ansicht infrage stellen.

Betrachten wir die kleine Kolonie, die sich auf zwei Inseln niederlässt und sich (gewaltlos) von den Herrschern und dem Rest der Gesellschaft abgrenzt. Anderswo ist alles leicht verfügbar, der Konsum grenzenlos, und die Menschen sind zu reinen Individualisten geworden.

Auf den Inseln hingegen wird der Konsum maßvoll gestaltet, soziale Normen sind etabliert, und es herrscht ein Gefühl der gegenseitigen Rücksichtnahme. Die Menschen leben in einer Gemeinschaft.

Der Unterschied ist deutlich: Das Problem der Gesellschaft liegt nicht in der Bedürfnisbefriedigung, sondern im ungebremsten Aufstieg des Individualismus und dem Fortbestehen einer wettbewerbsorientierten Gesellschaftsstruktur. Dieser Wettbewerb manifestiert sich nicht mehr im Geld, sondern in der Kunst und dem Streben nach Wissen, insbesondere im Anspruch auf Urheberschaft an diesen Bestrebungen.

Meiner Ansicht nach sind Kunst und Wissenschaft Bereiche, die gemeinsam erlebt werden sollten; Forschung findet in Gruppen statt und sollte dem Gemeinwohl dienen. Kunst wird subjektiv als gut empfunden, wenn jeder sie erleben und sich darin wiederfinden kann.

Insgesamt war es ein sehr gutes Buch. Auch wenn mich das etwas kryptische Ende gestört hat.

It was about fleet combat, all sub-light. There were jump points, courier ships to convey information... and that's about all I remember. It was terribly cool to my teenage brain in the '90s, and I'd like to experience it again.

I can't recall the author or title. The story is about a man who goes to a weird city, or planet, where the people in the market wear giant hats with gardens on them, apes are given instructions and then lift the ink off the paper so the paper can be reused, a dentist offers to clean the man's teeth for free because he will be keeping the minerals (in the plaque, I guess). He has to borrow money and the people there have plenty of money, they just don't seem to spend it. Eventually he decides to stay because the "hook has slid in painlessly."

It's a soft SF satire from 1960s-1980s, and the author is fairly well-known. It was published in an anthology, last I saw it. Does anyone remember it?

EDIT: The hats may have been gardens but they also had some glue which trapped birds which sang a sad threnody...these people wasted nothing.

I just discovered I have the chance to get Robert Silverberg's autograph at a convention next week. Unfortunately I've already reached the weight limit on my baggage, so i am going to have to bring just one or two books.

Which of Silverberg's books should I bring?

Becky Chambers https://www.otherscribbles.com/#/as-you-wake-break-the-shell/ and Neal Stephenson https://mainpointbooks.com/book/9780062839732 both released new books yesterday. FYI.

I picked this up today after randomly finding it in my local book store. What books have you been moved to purchase because of the first look?

Recently read another of Del Rey's juvenile sf novels. I'm very much liking these kinds of stories, and I maybe older, but I'm taking quite a lot of enjoyment from them! Just fast and snappy.

The story for this one is a bit more interesting as it's pretty much both a Adventure SF and a first contact. In "Outpost" a father and son become stranded on an colony outpost on one of Jupiter's moons, after the father had become suddenly ill.

The son, Bob Wilson is forced to abandon his plans for college and joins the colonist's struggle on the moon's harsh landscape. Wilson is exhilarated by the challenges, comradeship and spectacle of Jupiter hovering in the sky, going completely beyond his expectations. But it also includes his investigation of an odd globe that is in the hills and seems to be trying to communicate with the colony. But the colony is struck with a plague and the angry and frightened colonists have now accused him of being the carrier.

There's a bit of realism to it, but it extends mostly with subject of living in an actual planetary colony. Really like to get into more of his novels, and that's also going to include maybe some of his short story collections, but that's going to be all for a long while. Since we're in October I've got a few horror novels that I'm going to be reading!

The story involves the narrator meeting a young jockey at a bar, where a lot of people who work or are around the railway come to meet and find companionship. The story involves describing the young jockey as having a gin rummy/alchololic look, like his nose and his veins are affected by interstellar travel. There is also the implication that his nerves are damged and he is probably going to die soon, a lot of the story can also be read as an allegory for alcoholism/addiction, or turning to alcohol due to trauma etc. And the adverse affects of the fictional near ftl/or ftl mechanism is contrasted with how the railway system and rail travel has adversely affected the people in said bar. The story ends with the reveal that the guy/narratror is the inventor of the ftl that is affecting people, especially those pilot them, pretty terribly.

Might be by cm kornbluth, or maybe ed hamilton,

A man a lot of the older stuff were very cheesy, but pretty good too, Hard to find on the net though.

Edit:

Thanks for your detailed replies, and if I did ever end up writing my sf novel, I guess it'd be cool, if you, or anybody here might want to read it. Be warned though, I have been rejected by most science fiction publications, and I've tried, it is not an easy market to write for, especially for such an established genre, I guess. Though i have been published in magazines and journals, it's mostly been literary and weird/horror. Even though I like reading science fiction, I can't write it for anything. So if anyone's interested dm or comment here I guess.

This is my most recent publication:

https://www.ergot.press/authors/TTZ/Lillie

Book number thirteen of a twenty-one book science fiction and paranormal fantasy series. There is also an eleven book follow on series and many other books related to the The Kurtherian Gambit Universe, over 200 books in total. I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2016 that I bought new on Amazon in 2026. I have the next three books in the series and will read them soon. The related series are listed at:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?46598

The series is a cross between science fiction and paranormal fantasy. A thousand plus years ago, an alien space ship crash landed in the Baltics. A man, Michael, found the space ship, went inside, and was forever changed into the first vampire using alien nanocytes. However, there were werewolves and werebears already existing on Earth and they still exist but they are very rare.

Michael has sired vampires and they have sired vampires. But only one of the vampire "children" is a daywalker like Michael. And Michael enforces strict rules among the vampires and the weres, no blood drinking, no letting humans know of them, etc. Violators of Michael's rules face swift termination.

But it has been thousand years since Michael was changed and he now sleeps for years at a time. Michael's helpers found a young woman named Bethany Anne working for the USA government who is dying of a rare blood disease. Michael took her to the alien space ship to become the second first generation vampire on Earth.

Bethany Anne has created a huge workforce and they are swiftly moving ahead with incredibly advanced AI and space access technology. Bethany's people are building space ships and space stations with gravitic drives in them that all of the governments of Earth want to buy or steal. And the German government are mounting an expedition to Antarctica to see if the old Nazi base there still exists.

This series is real pulp like old science fiction with lots of action and dialogue. I love it !

Warning: this series might be damaging to your savings account since there are so many books.

The author has a website at:
https://lmbpn.com/

My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (3,508 reviews)
https://www.amazon.com/My-Ride-Bitch-Kurtherian-Gambit/dp/1642020540

Lynn

Rating: 4.25/5

Finished Children of Time last night, and it was a really good read, although not quite what I was expecting.

What I loved most was the storytelling. Watching the spiders evolve physically, intellectually, and socially over generations was fascinating. Seeing how their society developed little by little, with each generation building upon the achievements of the previous one, was probably the most unique aspect of the book for me. I haven't come across anything quite like it in sci-fi before.

However, the constant time jumps also made it difficult for me to get attached to the spider characters. Just when I started getting invested in one generation, the story would move forward and introduce a new set of characters. I understand that these time jumps are necessary to tell a story spanning thousands of years, but I still felt somewhat disconnected from the spiders on a personal level.

Before reading the book, I came across several reviews saying that the spider storyline was the most interesting part, while the human storyline was rather boring. Surprisingly, I found myself feeling almost the opposite. I really enjoyed the human storyline and their journey across thousands of years. Their struggles, decisions, and attempts to survive kept me invested in their side of the story. In fact, I sometimes found myself more interested in what was happening with the humans than with the spiders.

Another thing I wish the book had done differently was explore its ideas in greater detail. Despite being around 600 pages long, the book somehow felt too short to me. The evolution of the spiders and the development of their technology were often explained in brief paragraphs, leaving me wanting to know much more.

For example, the idea of using ant colonies to operate machinery was fascinating, but the explanation felt too brief. I wanted to understand how these systems actually worked and how the spiders developed such technologies. Having recently read The Three Body Problem trilogy, I was expecting a similar level of detail in the scientific explanations. I loved how Liu Cixin explored the mechanics behind his ideas, such as using human soldiers to simulate a computer and calculate the movements of the three suns. I wanted Adrian Tchaikovsky to spend more time exploring the science and engineering behind the spider's inventions.

Overall, Children of Time was a fantastic and genuinely unique sci-fi experience. I loved the central concept, the storytelling, and the way the book explored evolution and the development of an entirely different civilization. My main complaints are that I wanted more depth in the scientific explanations and that the time jumps made it difficult to form a strong attachment to the spider characters.

The Analog/Asimov's publishers released this bonkers statement on 10/9/26 on Bluesky. Here's how it starts off:

"We previously commissioned illustrators to create covers as work-for-hire when they were asked to adapt authors’ original stories for elements such as cover art.

"This will be changing.

"The rights granted to MRM by authors are limited, and therefore we can’t protect the intellectual property and rights of the original author of the story, if we at the same time grant the authors’ rights to the illustrator so that the illustrator can then retain an adaptation copyright. We don’t acquire rights from authors that allow us to grant illustrators broad unencumbered use of the worlds, characters, and other elements created by the author."

The entire nonsensical statement can be read at https://file770.com/must-read-magazines-issues-statement-on-cover-illustration-contracts/

This seems to be MRM's reaction to having been publicly called out a day earlier for predatory contract stipulations by a couple of artists who ended up walking away from offers to create cover art for the magazines.

You don't have to read the whole thing to see how crazy this is. I just want to focus on these two parts of the statement:

"The rights granted to MRM by authors are limited, and therefore we can’t protect the intellectual property and rights of the original author of the story..."

Of course, it isn't their job to protect the IP rights of the author. I'm no lawyer, but I assume that's why copyright laws exist. But setting that aside for a moment, I can't even figure out their argument here. The best I can translate is, "We need authors to surrender all their rights to us so we can... protect the author's rights." That makes no sense.

The there's this:

"We don’t acquire rights from authors that allow us to grant illustrators broad unencumbered use of the worlds, characters, and other elements created by the author."

I've had many works published in a number of illustrated children's magazines. I can tell you there is absolutely no circumstance ever that an illustrator would need "broad unencumbered use" of an author's rights to his/her/their text in order to create an illustration. This is not a thing. When an artist illustrates my work, I keep the copyright to my text, the illustrator keeps the copyright to their art. What's mine is mine, what's theirs is theirs. That's how it works.

According to John Picacio, one of the artists who publicly called out MRM, even after negotiating a better contract with them (which, btw, is not normal in the magazine world, as there isn't time to negotiate individual contracts with individual contributors) he was expected to waive his moral rights to his own work and give up all copyright. He understandably walked away.

So I want to say I enjoyed the book, and found the arc of the main character compelling and emotionally investing.

I haven't read a lot of critical reviews of it or interviews with the author or anything but I suspect she was trying to make homages to various giants on whose backs she stood upon.

The first to jump out would be Ian M. Banks, because it's a very Banksian space opera world. You've got a lot of cheeky robots on suspensors and alien aliens around. You've got a fatalism about societies that underlay the conception of the Culture. Ships with forests.and stuff. And on audible you've got that card Peter Kenny doing the narration with all of his cringey accents.

Maybe there is some Harrison, Reynolds, Tchaikovsky, etc in there...british sf authors. I don't know.

Its tropey - it's got a Faster Than Light Travel Is Weird And Possibly Actual Hell kind of thing going on. It's got a Humans Prefer Serfdom to Utopia thing going on.

There is a thing going on where the lead character is inexplicably turned into a monster/god and a thing about the machine intelligences having a master plan to make life better for all the organics and my main problem with the book is that these didn't play out the way I thought they might, but in the end I don't really understand what the author was trying to do with them.

I don't want to spoil anything here and it's highly possible it all went over my head. You get the deal with the MC at the beginning of the book. And the machines are there pretty much the whole time.

The course of the story follows the MC through the miseries that his special nature give him but he never really seems to try to figure out what his deal is. He just has a shitty time.

There is a nasty human civilization that is built around scarcity and callousness and domination. The MC is from this civilization but spends the book outside of it and it's not really the point either.

So when he has a deep conversation with the machine intelligence about his nature, and the role of the machine intelligence, and the fate of the nasty civilization, it falls flat because the book wasn't really building up on these fronts.

But still, the main character is a pretty compelling guy and you really get quite invested in him and and he does get quite a good arc.

So I was left feeling confused and not sure whether I had missed the real story, or if the author did.

The only recommendation I can give here is that there might be a lot more to this book for you if you are smarter than me.

I'm only about three chapters in and I'm confused about the railsea. Are the trains 4x larger than I'm imagining? It seems like a giant mole would just tear up the ground unless the tracks were that much larger and heavier. The book describes how it digs under the tracks, but that doesn't wreck the train or tear up the tracks.

I loved it, a lot of you will love it, but it's the kind of book that even if you don't love it, it's fun and goes down easy and you won't regret giving it your time and attention.

From the publisher's blurb, it's about a guy who in April 2026 begins to unexplainedly hop forward in time at 7:52 in the morning by an exponentially increasing number of days.

It's a story about change and loss as much as it is a spectacle of wonder, and it works really well as both because it's got such a straightforward, first person, reliable narrator writing style. There is no exposition at all, you are just riding along as this guy describes his experiences. It just makes it a super fun page turner of a book and I am sure a lot of folks are downing it in a day.

One thing that is funny about reading it is, I saw somebody's blog or something and they said it reminded them of Iron Man and I was like...what? But fwiw there is a definite Horizon Zero Dawn day in there. And the whole thing will definitely scratch any Olaf Stapledon itches you did or did not know you had.

Anyway, well worth your time.

Yes, just posting this again. Full disclosure - I supported them, but it's a make what is needed or it doesn't happen. Four days left as of now, and they are still a bit short.

See this link for the previous post (better than I could ever write): https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1whdetd/lightspeed_magazine_launched_a_kickstarter_to/

In short, make a pledge, get a year subscription to both Lightspeed (sci-fi) and Nightmare (horror). Or just one. Plus, it opens up quite a few options where you can purchase books signed by authors and other things.

Here is the link for the Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lightspeedmagazine/help-fund-lightspeed-year-17-and-nightmare-year-15/posts/4814290?ref=ksr_email_mktg_auto_backer_project_update_registered_users

I traveled to Williamsport, PA and was wonderfully surprised to see Paul Lehr sci-fi originals on exhibit at Pennsylvania College of Technology

Worth a trip!

https://www.pct.edu/news/articles/2026/08/26/sci-fi-work-of-paul-lehr-on-exhibit-at-the-gallery-at-penn-college

Hello, looking for novels that deal with interstellar politics and war between various human states, some stuff that I like include Battletech, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Gundam, and Hammer's Slammers. Some works that I haven't read yet but am interested in include A memory called Empire, Red Rising, and Space Carrier Avalon.