>>917 I doubt there would've been a single post for the entire board for the rest of the month honestly.

>>920 The BO fucked up by not posting himself and turning on IDs. Sometimes you gotta samefag to get the discussion going for others to join in.

>>791 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser The Dying Earth series (I highly recommend skipping the third book and going on to the fourth) Both are three volumes each if you get the omnibus editions for Fafhrd and skip the third Dying Earth book.

>>922 There simply isn't enough activity to split it in two and probably won't ever be here. This is the 45th post in 6 days. That's not even 8 per day. Much of that is arguing, such as this right now, or otherwise insubstantial posting that doesn't encourage posting. Having quantity of posting isn't enough. There's little value to a match without fuel to sustain the fire. As for IDs, the biggest boards have them here, and the site culture seems to support them, along with discouragement of sameposting. Will there be enough to overcome assimilation and entirely change the established culture? I don't know.

>>930 I agree with this. Additionally, the /sffg/ thread on /lit/ was not a bastion of diverse conversation. It was mostly fantasy - little science fiction. And among fantasy, there were several subgenres and authors that solicited a lot of the posts. You can't spread discussion across an entire board with so little to go on. This thread will be enough for our current situation. Either 4chan returns and we go back, or 4chan doesn't return and this thread slowly grows.

Is it possible to make a more higher level and deep progression fantasy story? There's Reverend Insanity but I think even if it has deeper meaning, the actual writing itself is kind of simplified for web novel readers maybe that's how the translation looks.

>>932 Yes, it's possible. The problem is that those who write that sort don't tend to slum it with these newly emerging genres. It's the same with genre vs literary fiction in general. What do you think about Dungeon Crawler Carl? The author is an older guy with minor literary success, though not commercial success, from decades ago.

>>933 On a different note, I've read professionally published in magazines of translated Chinese short stories that have some elements of what you're talking about, that had a higher level of writing, or at least of translating.

>>931 Growth isn't inevitable. Dying off because it fails to reach a critical threshold of posting over time and almost everyone leaves seems more likely to me. It'll be interesting to see whether it's about 4chan itself, or about being an imageboard and it's associated ideals. The vast majority are casuals and probably won't ever hear of anywhere, let alone go there. Maybe 4chan became a dead internet website and we're now seeing the effects of all the artifice being stripped away. I have no doubt many were relieved that "you're here forever" was a lie. Even with a displayed user count for thread, it's surely considerably less. The illusions have become more difficult to sustain.

This is the last meta/argument post I'll be doing. Post #1 - 07/11/21 (first post on the board) #682 - 11/20/24 (last before 4chan death, by bump order as far as I can tell. I don't know where the other posts are.) #696 - 4/16/25 (first post after 4chan died) #937 - 4/22/25 (this post) 242 posts in 6 days. That's 40 posts per day for the entire board, not even 2 posts per hour.

Any book recommendations on fantasy as a concept? Reading pic related and finding it really interesting. Anything that connects fantasy fiction to sociology or philosophy.

>>939 Do not read, he doesn't fuck the cat

>>945 then what's the point?

>>917 Deserved tbh

so this is where you niggers are

Anybody have the list of milf books one anon made?

>>952 Spoonfeeding service activated https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23588301#p23590358 Spoonfeeding service completed. You're welcome. This concludes your free trial. Please learn how to use the archive yourself, save your preferred materials, or pay for a premium spoonfeeding subscription.

>>952 The official Mom Protagonist SFF List. I apologize for the lengthy (ie autistic) list. I may update it later. >Caught in Crystal (1987) by Patricia Wrede >The Interior Life (1990) by Katherine Blake >Raven's Duology (2004-2005) by Patricia Briggs >Wolfblade Trilogy (2004-2005) by Jennifer Fallon >Bridge of D'Arnath (2004-2005) by Carol Berg >The World Gates Trilogy (2004-2005) By Holly Lisle, She wrote Minerva Wakes and the Arhel trilogy, those two books also have mom mc >Dragonsbane (1985) by Barbara Hambly >Paladin of Souls and Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold >Sunrunner Saga (1988-1993) by Melanie Rawn starting from book the mc has a son and he becomes the secondary mc >The Empire Trilogy (1987-1992) by Janny Wurts >Liveship Traders (1998-200) by Robin Hobb >Birthgrave (1975-1978) by Tanith Lee >Heart of Bronze (1997-1998) by Matthew Stover >Karavans Trilogy (2006-2012) by Jennifer Roberson >Skinwalkers (2014) by Wendy N. Wagner, about an ex-pirate Axe wielding mom! >Frostfell (2006) by Mark Sehestedt >Legacy of Steel (1998) by Mary H. Herbert >The Traitor Spy Trilogy (2010-2012) by Trudi Canavan >Sevenwaters Trilogy (1999-2001) by Juliet Marillier >Blood songs (1987, third book in the Frost trilogy) by Robin Wayne Bailey >Bloodsong Trilogy (1985-1986) by Asa Drake >Gypsies (1988) by Robert Charles Wilson >Child of Time (1991) by Robert Silverberg >The Wayfarer Redemption (1995-1999) by Sara Douglass, by book three almost every character is pregnant, after book three there's a 20 year time-skip so all the mcs have grown-up children >The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974) by Patricia A. McKillip >The Keys to Paradise Trilogy (1987-1988) by Robert Vardeman, trio of mcs all of the same importance, veterans of the Trans-War that ravaged the country, one of them is a cat-girl who saves a slave kid and adopts him >Bitter Angels (2009) by C.L Anderson >The Great Wheel (1987, book three of the Tredana Trilogy) by Joyce Ballou Gregorian >Daughter of the Bear King (1987) by Eleanor Arnason >Night-Threads series by Ru Emerson, portal fantasy about a druggie mom, her sister and her teenage son. >Frostflower adn Thorn (1980) Phyllis Ann Karr >Fifth Millenium by S.M. Stirling, Shirley Meier, and Karen Wehrstein >Spellsong Cycle (1997-2002) by L.E. Modesitt Jr >The Sword of Lyric by Sharon Hinck, christian portal fantasy about a soccer mom and her son fighting against Not-Satan >Cradle of Sea and Soill (2020) by Bernie Anes Paz >Boneshaker (2009) Cherie Priest >The Gap Cycle by Stephen Donaldson, absolute grimdark kino but like most of Donaldson's work it has a happy ending, the main characters just have to go through hell to get it. >Dragon Gate by Linsay Buroker, a six book epic about a Mother-son duo >Memories of Ice (2001 Book 3 of Malazan Book of the Fallen) by Steven Erikson, thanks to the kind anon who mentioned it in the last thread. >To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987) by Robert Heinlein >The Keeper's Six by Kate Elliott Belgariad has an aunt/nephew

>>945 I don't think Dean Ing lets his humans do the Kzinti in "Cathouse" either. Which is a strange book anyway, doesn't seem to have a lot of connexion with the rest of the Niven-Pournelle universe Ing's playing in. Looks like a book Ing was writing on the side but figured he could get more eyeballs if he brought it into the Kzin universe.

>>953 oh ffs, the "reverend insanity" spammer is in that thread too. I eventually started reporting those comments. glad he's not here (yet)

Vardeman got with Victor Milan in the "War of Powers" series, he put a catgirl attendant in an orgy in like the fifth book or something. WoP was probably Vardeman's best work, I've tried some of his others and never got far.

>>709 Most sci fi books are stupid because they still cling to the idea of a hero protagonist. Are there any books that are more realistic where individuals have very small contributions but it follows larger trends in humans as a species?

>>1016 Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

>>1017 To add to what Anon said. I remember in the first books there were these occasional interruptions of a past very-important historian discussing observed social trends, these trends were being observed and repeated in the present of the Foundation. The only exception to such a trend was a biological factor in future humanity unpredictable to the historian but very impactful to the setting. I think this comparison-and-explanation wasn't used as much in latter books but never entirely abandoned.

I finally finished The Peacekeeper Initiative by Glynn Stewart. Something about his style of writing is making reading it feel like a chore, though I can't specifically point out any big flaws in the storytelling. There's nothing exceptionally great about the prose, but it does its job of delivering the story. Workmanlike is how I would describe it. Most characters end up feeling distant and not particularly memorable. There's a man that appears on almost every page but the only thing I can tell you about his personality is that he's African and yes, he's black, as the author remembers to specifically mention two or three times in each novel. Other than that he's just a voice that reports intel to the captain, like most of the other characters. Besides the captain MC, only his diplomat friend and the Irish alcoholic leader of the fighter squadron get fleshed out at all, but I wouldn't call any of them particularly memorable either. But the characters aren't really the focus. What I like about Stewart's writing is that he obviously takes his sci-fi worldbuilding, space combat tactics and physics seriously. No, I wouldn't exactly call it hard SF — there's a number of magic sci-fi technologies that enable a very familiar feeling space opera setting, not just one or two necessary evil "big lies" — his spaceships have not just FTL drives, but also artificial gravity generation, inertia dampeners and shields — FTL communication also exists in the setting, although circumstances force the protagonists to lose access to it in the first book, meaning in the second book they have to rely on FTL drones to act as couriers for interstellar comms. It does feel like the author did his world-building in reverse, instead of defining a few rules for his setting and projecting the likely outcomes, he looked at a generic space opera like Star Trek, and worked backwards to figure out a minimal amount of fudging the science to get something resembling that, without going full handwave mode. All the technologies and their consequences are well thought out, and their capabilities and limitations defined. The gravity tech performs double duty to not just make space travel comfortable, but also to form the basis for a shield technology that relies on a shear in time-space to repel incoming beams and projectiles. And FTL does not only enable interstellar travel, but is also slapped on missiles to allow them to "skip" past shields and detonate warheads inside enemy ships. Even better, distances, velocities and accelerations are all defined in real world units, at all times, for all ships, especially during battles. Cowards are the sci-fi authors who don't do this. There are no ships traveling at "speed of plot" here. ETA's for ships arriving from FTL jumps are tracked. Exact numbers of missiles launched in volleys and their yields are also mentioned. Looking at the impressive size of the author's bibliography, he is obviously prolific. But I suspect his output could be better if he spent more time polishing and remembered to give his characters personalities.

This novel is a weird mish-mash of genres and disparate ideas. It feels like it could have been at least five different novels, but instead it has all these plots running in parallel. The main premise is that in an alternate history Britain an inventor builds a machine that creates portals into fictional works, allowing real people to step inside books and fictional characters to enter the real world — then, a league of criminals led by a maniacal supervillain steals the machine and starts blackmailing the world by threatening to kill beloved characters from literature. Enter Thursday Next, the literary detective whose job becomes to rescue the kidnapped Jane Eyre, return her to the book she came from and prevent Super Evil Psychoman (not his actual name, but might as well be) from causing further damage to the classic novel. And that's just what the main story is about, the side stories are almost equally wacky. If the reality-hopping portals didn't make things confusing enough, there's time travel too. Throw in vampires and werewolves because why not. An interesting choice is making the book people conscious of the fact that they're fictional characters following a predetermined script. I didn't expect it, but it may have made things more interesting by introducing some twists to the plot's science fiction logic. The book world follows its own rules. The characters are locked into doing whatever the writing on the pages says, but only when they're under the author's narrative focus. It's convenient that Jane Eyre is written in first person, as that means the other characters are free to do whatever they wish when they're not seen or heard by Jane. This limited free will proves useful as the other book characters can help Thursday Next plot against the interloping supervillain behind the scenes to protect the narrative of their own book, unbeknownst to the reader. Make no mistake, this book is total slop. But it's entertaining at the very least, and sometimes manages to elicit a sensible chuckle, though I would not crown the author a master of comedy. I think the one gag I laughed the hardest at was one of his villains literally being named Jack Schitt. His approach to humor is basically flood the zone, sling enough absurd shit on the page at a fast enough pace and keep escalating and some of it is bound to be funny.

It's somewhat impossible to talk about this novel without also talking about the long shadow cast by the 1972 film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. Whenever I bring up the movie in discussion, I unmask one or two Lem fans who always, without fail, bring up how the book is better. I politely nod and mumble about how I should read it, while internally recoiling in skepticism. That Stanislaw Lem? The author of the Cyberiad? Now, having finally read it, I can confirm my gut feeling was right. I should have known I was being memed. Now, it's by all means, not a bad story. But I wouldn't really call it "better". It's certainly different from the movie, which took a lot of liberties, partially due to budget constraints, and 1970s special effects technology being entirely insufficient to portray the strangeness of the alien ocean, or the floating station levitating close to its surface. The filmmakers solved it by turning the station into a more conventional orbiting outpost and simply ignoring the pages and pages of autistic descriptions of the bizarre forms spewed forth by the alien intelligence's strange creative powers (aside from the one part with the pilot describing his encounter with the giant "form" in front of a committee, which is one of the most powerful moments in the movie, despite it just being a guy monologuing in front of a camera). It turns out none of the core story requires the station to be physically next to the ocean, anyhow. I always wondered how the visitors reached the station from the planet surface, and expected the book to be more grounded somehow, but how they got inside is left as a mystery here, as well. I also prefer the movie's bleaker, more enigmatic ending note. I have to voice how much I dislike the whole concept of the station being held aloft by anti-gravity repulsor lifts. It's some kind of a cousin of the Cloud City. Come on, it's a planet both with an ocean and an atmosphere. If this had been written by Arthur C. Clarke, the station would have been either some kind of a blimp, or just a regular boat. But no, we must smuggle antigravity technology into a story that doesn't need it. Of course, the movie kept the station's disc shape, implying generated gravity, but that's a pretty common trope in the live action medium and they obviously didn't have the budget for a 2001 style rotating wheel station. It's easier to ignore. While Lem has a talent for describing the strange in visually evocative ways, I feel in the case of this story, he ends up wasting the reader's time and patience trying to explain something that fundamentally cannot be explained. The entire premise of Solaris is absurd. A sentient ocean is absurd. An alien intelligence creating homunculi from the memories of a station crew is absurd. When this is the matter your story is composed of, it's best to not even try to pretend it's scientific. It's basically a spooky ghost story in space. When stripped of Tarkovsky's genius cinematography, it's an above average Star Trek episode. Using fewer words makes the mystery more compelling.

I appreciate your reviews, anon.

Reposting this here so I can more easily find it. The official Mom Protagonist SFF List. I apologize for the lengthy (ie autistic) list. I may update it later. >Caught in Crystal (1987) by Patricia Wrede >The Interior Life (1990) by Katherine Blake >Raven's Duology (2004-2005) by Patricia Briggs >Wolfblade Trilogy (2004-2005) by Jennifer Fallon >Bridge of D'Arnath (2004-2005) by Carol Berg >The World Gates Trilogy (2004-2005) By Holly Lisle, Arhel trilogy and Minerva Wakes too >Dragonsbane (1985) by Barbara Hambly >Paladin of Souls and Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold >Sunrunner Saga (1988-1993) by Melanie Rawn. Mommy Sioned best yandere girl >The Empire Trilogy (1987-1992) by Janny Wurts >Liveship Traders (1998-200) by Robin Hobb >Birthgrave (1975-1978) by Tanith Lee >Karavans Trilogy (2006-2012) by Jennifer Roberson >Skinwalkers (2014) by Wendy N. Wagner, ex-pirate Axe wielding mom! >Frostfell (2006) by Mark Sehestedt >Legacy of Steel (1998) by Mary H. Herbert >The Traitor Spy Trilogy (2010-2012) by Trudi Canavan >Sevenwaters Trilogy (1999-2001) by Juliet Marillier >Blood songs (1987) by Robin Wayne Bailey >Bloodsong Trilogy (1985-1986) by Asa Drake >Gypsies (1988) by Robert Charles Wilson >Child of Time (1991) by Robert Silverberg >The Wayfarer Redemption (1995-1999) by Sara Douglass >The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974) by Patricia A. McKillip >The Keys to Paradise Trilogy (1987-1988) by Robert Vardeman, trio of mcs all of the same importance, veterans of the Trans-War that ravaged the country, one of them is a cat-girl who saves a slave kid and adopts him >Bitter Angels (2009) by C.L Anderson >The Great Wheel (1987) by Joyce Ballou Gregorian >Daughter of the Bear King (1987) by Eleanor Arnason >Night-Threads series by Ru Emerson, portal fantasy about a druggie mom, her sister and her teenage son. >Frostflower adn Thorn (1980) Phyllis Ann Karr >Fifth Millenium by S.M. Stirling, Shirley Meier, and Karen Wehrstein >Spellsong Cycle (1997-2002) by L.E. Modesitt Jr >The Sword of Lyric by Sharon Hinck, christian portal fantasy about a soccer mom and her son fighting against Not-Satan >Cradle of Sea and Soill (2020) by Bernie Anes Paz >Boneshaker (2009) Cherie Priest >The Gap Cycle by Stephen Donaldson, absolute grimdark kino but like most of Donaldson's work it has a happy ending, the main characters just have to go through hell to get it. >Dragon Gate by Lindsay Buroker, a six book epic about a Mother-son duo >Memories of Ice (2001 Book 3 of Malazan Book of the Fallen) by Steven Erikson >To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987) by Robert Heinlein >The War Eternal by Rob J Hayes >Black Jewels by Anne Bishop I'm open to any suggestions for SFF books with mom mc And Kate Elliott's new Mom protagonist book the Keeper's Six. BakkerWolfeVance is king etc.

>"If you have any concerns, any questions, about our mission or our situation, now is the time to raise them." >"We are supposed to be a peacekeeping force, ser," Albertosaur's captain said slowly. Lieutenant Colonel Omobolanle Abiodun was an immense African with swirling tattoos inked across their face. Henry didn't know quite what the tattoos meant, but he understood them to be related to Abiodun's culture's traditional third gender. Okay, so another author who thinks a reasonable way to evade pursuers is to beeline for the nearest "meteor swarm" that just happens to be there and "fill" space (all the famously vast expanse of) with debris to confuse enemy sensors that I guess were salvaged from sunken WW2 German submarines. He may speak the language of hard science fiction, but he's writing space opera after all. As a bonus he uses the terms "meteor", "asteroid" and "comet" interchangeably for "rock floating in space". Are they about to enter a planetary atmosphere as a screaming fireball of plasma and disintegrating matter? Are they on a highly elliptical orbit that takes them both extremely far from the parent star and so close that they exhibit outgassing? No and no? They're asteroids, man. Semantics aside, formations of rocks also usually need some kind of an active force to keep them as a "swarm", let alone one dense enough for anyone to hide in. Otherwise they spread out into an extremely thin ring around the supermassive star that the breathless finale of this novel is set near. I might have given it a pass, if he had provided any explanation at all, even if it was just the typical "Lagrange points lol", but no. I'm supposed to think this anomaly is commonplace I guess. I'm also not particularly happy with how things appear to be moving toward inertialess drives being an actual thing, even though I like the explanation that this is an inevitable consequence of the gravity technology that so far has been used for generating gravity on board ships as well as shielding against weaponry. Yeah, I suppose it would be. But it's still another nail on the coffin that condemns this series as another wannabe Trek and something I can't take particularly seriously as science fiction. The tense and action-packed finale was needed, however, since the first two-thirds of the book were so slow I considered putting it down several times. If you ignore the liberal bending of science and bland characters, there's a very compelling military space opera scenario here, comparable to something like The Wrath of Khan, but with fewer Trek-isms, more high-yield nuclear warheads and with technobabble that is most of time on point. The first two acts, though, man. There's nothing wrong with slow, but when the plot revolves around high stakes diplomatic maneuvering, I would expect the character writing to be up to nuff. Detailed descriptions of space combat remain Glynn Stewart's strength, interesting and likeable characters and dialogue not so much. The alcoholic rage-head CAG Samira O'Flannagain has sort of grown on me, but there aren't a lot of standouts like her. I can forgive the fact that I'm not quite sure how she still has a job. I'm just glad that she's there, because without her the entire cast would be almost insufferable. I actually ended up disappointed in a few fakeout deaths not because it's a trope but because I wanted those characters dead. I start to realize that the reason I like O'Flannagain is because she's the only character here with some actual severe flaws. In some other series, she might have been the standout annoying mood wrecker, but here her comedic relief actually provides some welcome respite. I get that the setting of highly ranked military personnel and elite diplomats in the forefront of space travel kind of automatically steers the cast toward highly trained peak humans with little room for colorful flawed personalities but dammit this class needs more clowns. Even Arthur C. Clarke is better at making you care about his stoic spacemen even if his stories suffer from similar problems from time to time.

Malcolm Jameson is one of the O.G.'s from the golden age of a science fiction. In this collection of six stories, we find the space patrol man John Bullard in different stages in his career, from a newly recruited greenhorn, to an acting admiral of the fleet. I found the first two, "Admiral's Inspection" and "White Mutiny" the most interesting, ironically, because they were the least science-fictiony of the bunch, and seem to be heavily drawing from the author's own experience in the American navy. As such, the fact that they're set on a uranium-powered rocketship in space almost takes the backseat, as we learn about the regulations and protocols and customs of life on a naval ship, the group dynamics and camaraderie of the corps, and the difference between a rules-lawyering bad captain and a leader who truly inspires men. Reading this right after Glynn Stewart was eye-opening in a way. I previously had difficulty putting into words what exactly I found lacking with Stewart's writing and particularly the way he portrayed military characters. On the surface he's done his research and can more or less accurately describe the rank and division of a believable space navy, as well as all the salutes and uniforms and protocols of person-to-person interaction in such a setting, but in the end it feels abstract and impersonal, like it's written by someone who knows the theory, but lacks the personal experience. In Jameson's writing we can see the knowing observations of someone who not only knows the letter of the rules, but all the small ways in which the said rules get sidestepped and broken day-to-day as nothing on the ground works the way the desk jockeys dreamt when writing the rulebook. While the portrayal of the characters is not extremely psychologically deep and many of them come across as little more than caricatures, at the core they feel true to life, they're actual "types" you might have met somewhere, even if you never stepped foot in a military setting (Lucky you.) What I've said here is not meant as a slight on Stewart's ability to write, in a way it's an endorsement, as he has done the research, and that is more than I can say for many authors. Still, the difference between "having done the research" and "knowing what you write" can be dramatic to see side by side. The science fiction elements here (they exist) are also at their best in the first two stories I feel, where it's gratifyingly physical, all steel beams and fire and muscle and ball bearings and Bullard using jury-rigged magnetostriction to balance sets of enormous gyros. The later stories, jaunty adventures that might have been starring Flash Gordon himself, get increasingly improbable, like drunken tales related by an old space dog in a dive on Juno. Some of them remind me of some of the more humorous episodes in the original series of Star Trek. Might have Roddenberry been directly inspired by John Bullard's adventures to write the voyages of James Kirk I don't know, but if he was, the links can be seen.

>>1050 P.S. Some additional observations I forgot to mention. That's what I get for deleting an almost fully written post and rewriting it from scratch. I did mention the gyros, but it's worth noting these are stories written in pre-Sputnik times, and gyroscopes are something that are used in the maneuvering of real spacecraft now. When I was checking some facts for my review, I came across something that was new to me: Gyroscopes have been used in the navigation of nautical vessels since the early 1900s, particularly submarines where a magnetic compass is impractical. They were actually the superior form of navigation until they were largely replaced by GPS. Jameson was a navy man so he would have known all about this. Assuming that a spaceship would also have gyros was probably natural and obvious to him, of course, in space there's the added benefit that a gyroscope can actually be used to rotate the craft without wasting precious propellant. He knew this and he was correct. He could also easily gotten confused and thought the gyro would be great for getting bearings and navigating in space, but no, he shows the spacemen using scopes to navigate using the stars instead. An even older nautical tradition, and yes it works in space. Would be done largely by computers now, but how he would've known. No doubt other writers in his time also wrote about similar things, of course, they were no different from modern writers in that they also read scientific literature and tried to get their facts right. A lot of this stuff came fron Wernher Von Braun. I'm not super well read in this era of sci-fi, so I was positively surprised. I was expecting something far wackier. Something that I found even more startling was that Jameson described what is essentially a Whipple shield in the nose cone of the Pollux. I thought this was a relatively modern invention (and another thing used in real spacecraft) but I checked and Fred Whipple mentioned the idea of using a multi-layered "meteor bumper" to dissipate the kinetic energy of collisions in his paper Meteorites and Space Travel published in 1947 (10 years before Sputnik). So it would have been the latest word around the time Jameson was writing his stories. He was not prescient but he was up to date about the scientific discourse in his day. Finally, he talks about, I shit you not, thrust vectoring (it rules the skies) — he calls it jet deflection, which is not an incorrect term, it's one of the methods of doing thrust vectoring today — so his rocketships don't rely on gyros alone. I won't even bother to dive into the no doubt complicated history of this, but to say the least, I am at awe. Malcolm Jameson was technically literate. All this is of course mixed in with all kinds of goofiness that you would expect from something written in the 1940s, such as mentions of the docsmithian device, Visi-Plate, (a surprisingly wide-spread trope, but the writers seemingly intuitively knew that bulky CRTs and oscilloscopes wouldn't have been futuristic enough for their sci-fi stories) little men on Ganymede, Neptune having a landable surface with a vacuum atmosphere, steamy jungles on Venus, but again, consider this was before Sputnik. A lot of this stuff would have sounded at least semi-plausible since they knew shit all about the solar system back then. Oh, and one of the stories describes the skymen playing a zero-G team sport to practice their three-dimensional awareness and dexterity. Orson Scott Card wasn't the first one to think of that.

Oops, a factual mistake. Jameson (1891–1945) was dead by the time Whipple published anything about his shield.

Finally got around to reading something relevant to the thread theme. Is Speaker-to-Animals the most iconic space cat in science fiction? Teleportation. Reactionless drives. Anti-gravity. Impenetrable stasis fields. Alien megastructures. Very early on it becomes clear this is not hard science fiction. I should've had a bad time, but thankfully Larry Niven is not a poor writer. He has wit and humor and doesn't take his setting too seriously. His characters constantly bicker and quip like in a Marvel movie, which helps, as I probably couldn't stand them if they were serious all the time. His science isn't all bad, he understands the way spaceships move in space and when he breaks physics he usually does it on purpose, not by mistake. I spotted a few exceptions, such as the good ole just use a mirror to deflect a military grade laser trope, with the added bonus of colored fabrics apparently being good enough to stop lasers of the same color. Bussard ramjets make an appearance, an idea largely discredited now, but in fairness he couldn't have known. The story has an undercurrent of anxiety about overpopulation, which is so 20th century. After meeting exotic aliens like kzin and puppeteers, I found it a bit disappointing that the inhabitants of Ringworld are just humans. I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of an inversion of a trope, as the story treats the two alien companions of Louis as allies that can be empathized with, rather than as a strange other. It's not your usual type of first contact story. Oh, do I even need to explain what a Ringworld is? After all, by this point, it's a concept permeating popular culture. This is the book that famously ripped off Halo. Larry's approach to inviting suspension of disbelief reminds me of the old salesman's tactic where you place an expensive piece of merchandise next to something even more ridiculously unaffordably expensive, so that the less expensive product on the shelf appears more reasonably priced in comparison. He has a character explain a Dyson sphere first, before he starts talking about the Ringworld, I guess in the hopes that the reader would now believe the idea of a solid ring made of a nearly indestructible material 2 AU in diameter isn't totally batshit insane. Sorry, it still is. The variable blade is a clear precursor of a light saber. Strangely, after it's introduced it never really becomes a plot point again. No, sorry, I meant to say Larry Niven ripped off Star Wars. Does he have any imagination? I felt the quality of the writing drops a bit toward the end, perhaps due to the author rushing to wrap things up. I especially cringed at the insistence of keeping Louis' big plan a secret, with his companions, including the fierce and proud cat beast and the cowardly puppeteer who usually wants to make sure that everything is perfectly safe before committing to anything, just going along for days with no one questioning why they're pinning everything on a plan this one guy simply refuses to explain. Especially when it clearly has elements that could go catastrophically wrong any time killing everyone and/or destroying their only hope of escape. I get they were not professional explorers but at this point I felt like I was just watching a bunch of bumbling retards, or more accurately, plot automatons slaved to the author's desire to move things forward while maintaining the ending "surprise", which to me wasn't much of a surprise at all as I guessed the nature of the mystery object in question pretty much the moment it was first described early in the book. After all, this non-surprise would have been spoiled if the team sat down like adults and discussed both the strong points and weaknesses of the plan before doing anything. An enjoyable sci-fantasy adventure with a mildly disappointing ending, with elements of mystery that sometimes land and sometimes fall flat. It's not terrible but I'm a bit puzzled by its lofty reputation.

Ah, 1970. The world was full of optimism. Nixon was the president, the oil crisis had not yet begun, and all the science fiction authors thought you could fly to another star in a human life span just by scooping the hydrogen existing in abundance in interstellar space, using it for fusion, and generating infinite 1G of acceleration. The idea is that the mass ratio problem of interstellar travel disappears if you don't have to carry your own propellant, thus allowing a ship to accelerate to such a large fraction of light speed that the time dilates to the point where hundreds of light years of travel can be experienced in a mere few years of shipboard time. Thus also making the problem of finite crew life span to go away, and as a triple whammy, the magnetic scooping field also protects the ship from impacts and deadly radiation. On top of all this it's mere icing on the cake that with a constant thrust of 1G, you don't have to worry about the effects of microgravity on organisms. In reality, there are numerous problems with a Bussard ramjet. Bussard himself noted that just building such a thing would be enormously difficult, after all, one of the components is a fusion reactor (using hydrogen as a fuel supposes proton-proton fusion, which is extra difficult, and might not be possible), and that interstellar hydrogen is not evenly distributed. And then the density of the hydrogen in actual space is lower than he assumed. The density in local space near our Sun is particularly low. You would also have to reach a significant fraction of c just to reach a speed where the ramjet can [i]start[/i] operating, meaning you'd need to carry some fairly exotic secondary form of propulsion in addition to the ram scoop. It might not be possible to build a laser that can ionize a large enough volume of hydrogen to make it responsive to the magnetic scoop, while not using more energy than the fusion reactor provides. In 1978, T.A. Heppenheimer wrote that the ramjet would actually experience drag, and it most likely wouldn't be possible to build a scoop that wouldn't fail to stress long before the extreme velocities in this novel could be reached. There is a maximum speed for such a ship which is 12% of c. There are also some cosmological assumptions that might be considered outdated today. But I won't go deeper into those. It's not like we've fully figured out the universe even today. But, I can't help but feel this is all mere pedantic nitpicking. After all, compared to the question of can a future spaceship ever travel faster than light? (Physics gives us a hard "no") An interstellar space drive concept that seems merely extremely improbable, is still vastly more realistic. In the end, these are engineering problems, not the breaking down of a fundamental physics principle. It's conceivable that a sufficiently advanced civilization could solve these problems and... wait. What's this? A world ruled by Sweden? This is not science fiction. This is fantasy. The novel is like those examples in physics textbooks that ask you to imagine a spaceship with a clock inside it moving at near light speed to illustrate the effects of relativity, except instead of being contracted into one paragraph and a diagram, it's stretched out into the length of a full novel. Sound exciting? But fear not, it's at least well written. Poul Anderson is one of the rare breed of science fiction authors who can both write prose and understand physics. I could imagine some of his descriptions of stars and galaxies sounding amazing spoken in Carl Sagan's voice over a backdrop of 1970s synths. With all joking done and all the issues with the drive concept enumerated, it does not seem like the property of a just universe that this novel should be seemingly less well known and accoladed than Niven's Ringworld that was published in the same year, with jankier writing and far more handwavey science. Just a nomination for Hugo? If I had the power to heap all the awards on Tau Zero, I would. If you're a fusion ram scoop enjoyer, this is the book to read. >"The conditions are too unnatural. Some of us can adapt, but I've learned that others can't. So we absolutely have to push tau down as low as may be, no matter what the dangers. Not simply to make the trip itself short enough for us to endure. But for the psychological need to do our utmost." >"How is that?" >"Don't you see? It's our way of fighting back at the universe. Vogue la galère. Go for broke. Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. I think, if I can put the matter to our people in those terms, they'll rally. For a while, anyhow." >"The wee birdies sing and the wild flowers spring, >And in sunshine the waters are sleeping —"