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RAISING STEAM by TERRY PRATCHETT was a damn good read, despite the little hiccups I had to solve, and I had a tear in my eye thinking about, how aside from the next and last one in the series, there would be no more by the genius author ... that we would get no more of his amazing wit and insight into people and things ... what a loss ... damn Alzheimers ... how could it happen to such a brilliant mind. A real shame and tragedy it happens to anyone, but to him....
Post edited July 31, 2020 by Timboli
Quite the update today, I've had time to read, but not much to write about it here...

A World Between - Norman Spinrad

A classic by this master of ironic and over-the-top, borderline anarchist SF writer (that I really love). It's not the first time I've read it, but I finally could find one to buy, even if it was used. Before, I've always read his books at the public library...
A World Between is the story of Pacifica, a planet that seems to have achieved the impossible: a considerable wealth by being the media heart and soul of the galaxy, a natural paradise with very different climates and landscapes, and the most difficult, true equality between men and women. So, is Pacifica a paradise? Looks like it!
...
At least until the "Pink and Blue war", the struggle between the Transcendental Science (lightyears ahead in terms of scientific progress, but very male-oriented as a society) and the Femocrats (a feminist dictatorship which has reduced the male population of the planets it conquered to mere genitors) crashes onto Pacifica. Will the planet survive this ordeal?

It's a masterpiece, with exactly the dose of cold science, steamy sexy, political discussions, humor and violence you would expect from Spinrad. A great, great read, that hasn't aged at all.

Le GAL l'égoût - Roger Martin

Another Le Poulpe book. A more unexpected story on this one, since Le Poulpe might have to help far-right groups, instead of bashing them on the head as usual. Quite well written and entertaining.

The Wolf of Wall Street - Jordan Belfort

I thought it was a fiction, turns out it's more a biography. Might be the book that gave us the movie with DiCaprio? Haven't seen the movie yet. But the book is a hell of a roller coaster ride! It's the story of Jordan Belfort, a genius that has a hell of a run as a broker in the 80-90's Wall Street. You wouldn't believe what happened to this guy, or more precisely what he did and how the hell is he still alive after all that... Drug, sex, fast cars and first-class jet-set life... Great book, gripping, until the end.

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

I don't think I have to introduce that book, really. And anyway, even if I wanted, the first rule of the Fight Club... you know the rest. Big disappointment for me. Couldn't enter in the story, couldn't find any point in the characters that would make me like or even stay interested in that story. Not that it is bad, okay, just it seems it was not for me, even if I've read it until the last page...

Ouarzazate et mourir - Hervé Prudon

One of the worst, if not the worst, book of the le Poulpe series I've read so far. Le Poulpe does nothing and spends the whole book (70 pages...) complaining about this and that. The story makes no sense.


So far in 2020 : https://www.gog.com/forum/general/books_finished_in_2020/post9
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xa_chan: Quite the update today, I've had time to read, but not much to write about it here...

A World Between - Norman Spinrad

A classic by this master of ironic and over-the-top, borderline anarchist SF writer (that I really love). It's not the first time I've read it, but I finally could find one to buy, even if it was used. Before, I've always read his books at the public library...
A World Between is the story of Pacifica, a planet that seems to have achieved the impossible: a considerable wealth by being the media heart and soul of the galaxy, a natural paradise with very different climates and landscapes, and the most difficult, true equality between men and women. So, is Pacifica a paradise? Looks like it!
...
At least until the "Pink and Blue war", the struggle between the Transcendental Science (lightyears ahead in terms of scientific progress, but very male-oriented as a society) and the Femocrats (a feminist dictatorship which has reduced the male population of the planets it conquered to mere genitors) crashes onto Pacifica. Will the planet survive this ordeal?

It's a masterpiece, with exactly the dose of cold science, steamy sexy, political discussions, humor and violence you would expect from Spinrad. A great, great read, that hasn't aged at all.
It has been some time since the last time I read anything by Norman Spinrad. I will take this one into account, now that you mentioned it.
This Crowded Earth (1958) by Robert Bloch 3.5/5

A short novel dealing with the problems of overpopulation, which was a popular theme on which for SF writers to extrapolate in the 1950's and 1960's, before one realized just how effectively one could house and feed 5+ billion people.

It was published in the October 1958 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories (as it was currently known). Amazing was one of the bottom of the barrel magazines, and since it was a long story I was ready to dismiss it, but I was encouraged by the reviews on Goodreads which ranged from praise to snowflakes being angry that the story was not about women. Apparently there is a segment of the SF readers who read SF to read about women, for some reason.
Also, the subject matter is interesting to me, and I was curious how a relative lightweighter (when it comes to the physical sciences) like Bloch dealt with it.

Apart from underestimating how adaptable human society really is, and how effective at production (making advertising still big business), Bloch got more of his projections right than most of his colleagues (see quotes at the end).

His solution to the overpopulation problem was also quite novel, and the only other instance I know is from the old Genesis song Get 'em out by Friday! from 1973:

[9 September 2012 T.V. Flash on all Dial-A-Program Services]
This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
"It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on
Humanoid height.


Googling did not indicate that Peter Gabriel who wrote the lyrics was inspired by Bloch's story, though.

The story starts like a regular story, and reminded me of The Space Merchants, with the protagonist in both stories working in advertising (which both Bloch and Pohl did at some time). But instead of following the protagonist closely in a short time, the story moves rapidly in vignette format jumping years with each chapter, and with different POVs. It's moves a bit too quickly maybe, and felt a bit rushed in the end, and the brisk early story turned more into exposition, but close to the turning point is quite quotable, where Bloch makes fun of many SF tropes:

[spoiler]
the old science fiction was fun while it lasted. Ever read any of it?"

"No," Harry admitted. "That was all before my time. Tell me, though—did any of it make sense? I mean, did some of those writers foresee what was really going to happen?"

"There were plenty of penny prophets and nickel Nostradamuses," Wade told him. "But as I said, most of them were assuming war with the Communists or a new era of space travel. Since Communism collapsed and space flight was just an expensive journey to a dead end and dead worlds, it follows that the majority of fictional futures were founded on fallacies. And all the rest of the extrapolations dealt with superficial social manifestations.

"For example, they wrote about civilizations dominated by advertising and mass-motivation techniques. It's true that during my childhood this seemed to be a logical trend—but once demand exceeded supply, the whole mechanism of stimulating demand, which was advertising's chief function, bogged down. And mass-motivation techniques, today, are dedicated almost entirely to maintaining minimum resistance to a system insuring our survival.

"Another popular idea was based on the notion of an expanding matriarchy—a gerontomatriarchy, rather, in which older women would take control. In an age when women outlived men by a number of years, this seemed possible. Now, of course, shortened working hours and medical advances have equalized the life-span. And since private property has become less and less of a factor in dominating our collective destinies, it hardly matters whether the male or the female has the upper hand.as I said, most of them were assuming war with the Communists or a new era of space travel. Since Communism collapsed and space flight was just an expensive journey to a dead end and dead worlds, it follows that the majority of fictional futures were founded on fallacies. And all the rest of the extrapolations dealt with superficial social manifestations.

"Then there was the common theory that technological advances would result in a push-button society, where automatons would do all the work. And so they might—if we had an unlimited supply of raw materials to produce robots, and unlimited power-sources to activate them. As we now realize, atomic power cannot be utilized on a minute scale.

"Last, but not least, there was the concept of a medically-orientated system, with particular emphasis on psychotherapy, neurosurgery, and parapsychology. The world was going to be run by telepaths, psychosis eliminated by brainwashing, intellect developed by hypnotic suggestion. It sounded great—but the conquest of physical disease has occupied the medical profession almost exclusively.

"No, what they all seemed to overlook, with only a few exceptions, was the population problem. You can't run a world through advertising when there are so many people that there aren't enough goods to go around anyway. You can't turn it over to big business when big government has virtually absorbed all of the commercial and industrial functions, just to cope with an ever-growing demand. A matriarchy loses its meaning when the individual family unit changes character, under the stress of an increasing population-pressure which eliminates the old-fashioned home, family circle, and social pattern. And the more we must conserve dwindling natural resources for people, the less we can expend on experimentation with robots and machinery. As for the psychologist-dominated society, there are just too many patients and not enough physicians. I don't have to remind you that the military caste lost its chance of control when war disappeared, and that religion is losing ground every day. Class-lines are vanishing, and racial distinctions will be going next. The old idea of a World Federation is becoming more and more practical. Once the political barriers are down, miscegenation will finish the job. But nobody seemed to foresee this particular future. They all made the mistake of worrying about the hydrogen-bomb instead of the sperm-bomb."


"Your Underground," Wade repeated. "Hell, every science fiction yarn about a future society had its Underground! That was the whole gimmick in the plot. The hero was a conformist who tangled with the social order—come to think of it, that's what you did, years ago. Only instead of becoming an impotent victim of the system, he'd meet up with the Underground Movement. Not some sourball like your friend Ritchie, who tried to operate on his own hook, without real plans or system, but a complete sub rosa organization, bent on starting a revolution and taking over. There'd be wise old priests and wise old crooks and wise old officers and wise old officials, all playing a double game and planning a coup. Spies all over the place, get me? And in no time at all, our hero would be playing tag with the top figures in the government. That's how it worked out in all the stories.

"But what happens in real life? What happened to you, for example? You fell for a series of stupid tricks, stupidly perpetrated—because the people in power are people, and not the kind of synthetic super-intellects dreamed up by frustrated fiction-fabricators. You found out that the logical candidates to constitute an Underground were the Naturalists; again, they were just ordinary individuals with no genius for organization. As for coming in contact with key figures, you were actually on hand when Leffingwell completed his experiments. And you came back, years later, to hunt him down. Very much in the heroic
tradition, I admit. But you never saw the man except through the telescopic sights of your rifle. That was the end of it. No modern-day Machiavelli has hauled you in to play cat-and-mouse games with you, and no futuristic Freud has bothered to wash your brain or soft-soap your subconscious. You just aren't that important, Collins."

[/spoiler]
Post edited August 06, 2020 by PetrusOctavianus
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PetrusOctavianus: A short novel dealing with the problems of overpopulation, which was a popular theme on which for SF writers to extrapolate in the 1950's and 1960's, before one realized just how effectively one could house and feed 5+ billion people.
*growls* Still is the world's biggest problem, and getting bigger every day, but saying so tends to get you mobbed from all sides. As for doing that "effectively", yeah, "only" at the cost of the environment and other species, the wellbeing of the vast majority of people, increased incidence of disease and pressure on health systems, and resources, including time, effort and ingenuity, that could otherwise be much better used actually improving things instead of mitigating the effects of a problem we ourselves create and continue to worsen at an ever increasing cost...
Post edited August 06, 2020 by Cavalary
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PetrusOctavianus: A short novel dealing with the problems of overpopulation, which was a popular theme on which for SF writers to extrapolate in the 1950's and 1960's, before one realized just how effectively one could house and feed 5+ billion people.
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Cavalary: *growls* Still is the world's biggest problem, and getting bigger every day, but saying so tends to get you mobbed from all sides. As for doing that "effectively", yeah, "only" at the cost of the environment and other species, the wellbeing of the vast majority of people, increased incidence of disease and pressure on health systems, and resources, including time, effort and ingenuity, that could otherwise be much better used actually improving things instead of mitigating the effects of a problem we ourselves create and continue to worsen at an ever increasing cost...
I agree with you that overpopulation is our main problem. The less population, the less climate gases released and less resources used, and less area used for crops and domestic animals. But, it also means less consumers, which means less consumption, which means less money to those who already have too much money, and we can't have that can we?
Instead there's a meaningless, even destructive focus on windmills and climate gases, when the root problem is overpopulation.

But my point was that the projections of the 1950's and 1960's were wrong. Things never got so bad as portrayed in old SF stories, and they did underestimate how effective future food production would be.
Post edited August 06, 2020 by PetrusOctavianus
Thanks to the suggestions of some forum members finally i read "On stranger tides" by Tim Powers.
I like it. I like the pirate stories and the films of Pirates of the Caribeanr, and i have in my mind that there is no casual the surname Hurwood with Threepwood, or with the chickens.
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argamasa: Thanks to the suggestions of some forum members finally i read "On stranger tides" by Tim Powers.
I like it. I like the pirate stories and the films of Pirates of the Caribeanr, and i have in my mind that there is no casual the surname Hurwood with Threepwood, or with the chickens.
Yes I read and very much enjoyed "On stranger tides" years before I saw the first film, and I reckon the films were definitely inspired by that book and maybe others.

I fully recommend you read "Chase The Morning" by Michael Scott Rohan, which has a somewhat similar feel to "On Stranger Tides". The book is the first in his Spiral series, with two direct sequels and a third quirky one.

And if you like straight Pirate stories, try out some novels and stories from the famous author Rafael Sabatini ... many of his stories have been turned into films, with perhaps the most notable being Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk.

Rafael Sabatini's works are mostly done in a similar adventure swashbuckling historical romance vein as many of the works of the earlier famous author Alexandre Dumas ... Three Musketeers, Count Of Monte Cristo, etc.

Great reads all of them ... timeless classics.
Post edited August 19, 2020 by Timboli
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xa_chan: A World Between - Norman Spinrad
Did you have the chance to read Little Heroes? If you like any kind of rock music, this is one of the very best cyberpunk novels ever. A very satisfactory reading. Powerful writing and ideas there.

Bug Jack Barron
. If you ever watched, say, Bill Maher...

The Solarians is from the beginning of his career. Not perfect, but it did a few things right.
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Timboli:
Thanks! I take note of these books and try to find them.
★☆☆ 14:57 do Czyty / Igor T. Miecik
★☆☆ Learning Jupyter / Dan Toomey
★★☆ Kasiarze, doliniarze i zwykłe rzezimieszki. Przestępczy półświatek II RP / Iwona Kienzler
★★☆ Tata bohater. Jak być mocnym ojcem, którego dzieci potrzebują / Meg Meeker
★★☆ Kasacja / Remigiusz Mróz
★★☆ Żar. Oddech Afryki / Dariusz Rosiak

List of all books read in 2020.
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xa_chan: A World Between - Norman Spinrad
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Carradice: Did you have the chance to read Little Heroes? If you like any kind of rock music, this is one of the very best cyberpunk novels ever. A very satisfactory reading. Powerful writing and ideas there.

Bug Jack Barron
. If you ever watched, say, Bill Maher...

The Solarians is from the beginning of his career. Not perfect, but it did a few things right.
I love Norman Spinrad and I've almost all of his work, I think. I keep re-reading them, that's how good this author is to me!

Actually, Little Heroes might have been the first book I've read from Spinrad. And without any pun, he rocked my world! I didn't know you could mix sex, politics, cyberpunk and social questions in such a powerful novel. I also love The Iron Dream, very disturbing and very logical at the same time. But the most "dreamy" of his books was maybe Child of Fortune. This book cannot actually be described, it has to be experienced!

Unfortunately, I'm a bit less of a fan of his most recent works. Greenhouse summer was... okay-ish, Oussama was a bit unsatisfying...
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ciemnogrodzianin: ★☆☆ 14:57 do Czyty / Igor T. Miecik
★☆☆ Learning Jupyter / Dan Toomey
★★☆ Kasiarze, doliniarze i zwykłe rzezimieszki. Przestępczy półświatek II RP / Iwona Kienzler
★★☆ Tata bohater. Jak być mocnym ojcem, którego dzieci potrzebują / Meg Meeker
★★☆ Kasacja / Remigiusz Mróz
★★☆ Żar. Oddech Afryki / Dariusz Rosiak

List of all books read in 2020.
Should I read some of them?
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JessicaDowd: ...
Hero: Being the Strong Father Your Children Need by Meg Meeker is worth reading, but I guess you'd prefer one of her books addressed to women :)
Learning Jupyter is far from being complex guide for this awesome tool.
And the rest of books are not available in English, I'm afraid. I may recommend learning Polish, if you're really interested in them ;)
Not precisely a book, but at 244 pages, it's longer than some books: Amazing Stories from January 1942. Nine short stories altogether:

The Test Tube Girl, by Ray Palmer (writing as "Frank Patton"). Lovely Virgil Finlay illustrations for this one. In the future, 1943, Hitler outfitted some of his troops with electron rifles that had the unfortunate side effect of irradiating the planet's atmosphere, causing almost every woman on Earth to become barren or at least incapable of carrying a healthy baby to term. Three heroic scientists hit on the idea of injecting plant-based serum into a female fetus to create a human-plant hybrid. Entertaining but kind of more interesting than good in the sense that you can see how Palmer reached some of his idea (e.g., we know that radiation can make people sterile), but the execution makes it come across slightly goofy.

Somerset, the Scientific Monkey, by Albert Bernstein. A comedic brain-swapping story involving a scientist and a monkey. It's not funny enough.

Mystery of the Blue God, by Harry Bates, author of the story that became the basis of The Day the Earth Stood Still. In a future dominated by little bald telepaths, Mickey is a strapping, blonde-haired genetic throwback with apparently no psychic ability, meaning he's regarded as an imbecilic genetic throwback. I really liked the early part of the story, just sketching out the world and who Mickey was, but when it got to the "blue god" part it kind of lost me. It was okay, I guess.

Planet of the Doomed Men, by Robert Moore Williams. Moore is one of those writers whose books I've often seen at used bookstores but I've never bit on one for whatever reason. Terminally ill patients are vanishing from hospitals. It turns out they're being transported to the far, far (farfarfar...really far) future, where they're cured and enlisted in a battle to save Earth from being taken over by newly evolved primates. This was actually pretty fun.

Outlaw of Mars, by Festus Pragnell, a rare case of a British writer selling stories to American pulp magazines. Part of a series that is a Barsoom take-off, but trying to add more humor to the mix. It didn't really work for me. I find many authors trying to imitate ERB don't have his creativity, and it wasn't terribly funny, either. I find you can often identify lesser artists when they do this sort of "Here's my take, but with more humor because who really cares about any of this silly stuff?" Or at least it takes a great deal of skill in its own right to pull it off.

Life for Sale, by Alfred Bester. Nominally a story about a city being taken over by what people today might characterize as "Big Pharma", although it's actually more of a Battle of the Sexes story. A tough guy and a tough gal have to put aside their differences to defeat the real bad guy. It has its moments but it doesn't have the blistering inventiveness that people associate with Bester's classic novels. It's also kind of inconclusive - the hero and heroine agree that they've reached an understanding at the end, but it's not clear what that means. Women will actually be allowed to be on the governing council? They're happy to go back to the kitchen and be homemakers? Who knows...

Rehearsal for Danger, by William P. McGivern (writing as "PF Costello"). A hard-nosed businessman is disgusted that his son is such an irresponsible party-boy, so he gets his right-hand man to take him on a trip to toughen him up. It's really kind of a comedy. It's okay. There's a twist I guessed almost right away, and it's the kind of story that with a few details altered could have been a nautical story set on Earth.

Q Ship of Space, by David Wright O'Brien (writing as "Duncan Farnsworth"). Another nautical yarn transplanted to a sci-fi setting, this time involving a first-time commander being suckered into a trap by a decoy vessel. Eh, it was alright. Resolution was kind of dumb.

Mystery on Base Ten, by McGivern. A short, punchy one about a woman out to clear her dad's name after he's killed in action and framed as a traitor, and her fiance, also a military guy, who's trying to save her from getting in over her head. This might be the best story in the issue because it sets up a situation with some likable heroes and shifty villains and then resolves it within 10 pages. I think McGivern was more comfortable with the non-sci-fi content because the story really comes alive when it's just guys punching and shooting each other in a hotel room (he did write The Big Heat, after all...). I get the sense that this is supposed to be the same world as Rehearsal for Danger and possibly the Q Ship story, too (McGivern and O'Brian apparently shared an office until O'Brian got drafted and then killed on a bombing raid).