So the climax of Babel has our main characters, Robin and Victoire on the run after they have escaped torture and imprisonment. Their secret society is in shambles. All of their friends are dead or have betrayed them. They decide to make a Hail Mary attempt to take over the Babel Tower, the residence and workshop of Oxford’s translation center. It’s also the key maintenance repository for all of the silver magic in England.

Without it, England’s entire Silver Industrial Infrastructure; from its bridges, its buildings, sewage, roads, and all manufacturing would crumble. All of the advancements of the Empire are maintained by this singular tower and the scholars inside. It’s vital to this version of the British Empire and everyone knows it.

And so, with a single magic bar that can cast a distraction, two guns, and a tepid rallying speech, their plan is to storm the tower and take it over. Okay, I’m still bought in.

They scatter the assigned half-dozen …

Dear readers and friends. The unhappy fact is—the numerous bouts of anaesthetic I’ve had have made it pretty well impossible for me to write. I drop stitches. Not many. No problems with daily life or doing creative stuff or enjoying life in general. But the ability to control narrative is just not what it was, and it’s just not going to be there. I’ve accepted that, painful as it is. I thank all of you who’ve stood by me patiently. The body of work is what it is, and I am lastingly grateful to my publisher, Betsy Wollheim, who has given me every extension of time and resource. And of course to Jane, who is all things.

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I’m not surprised. Repeated surgeries and chemo over the last six years must’ve take such a toll on her. And after eighty-something novels, the woman should get to enjoy her garden and her fish.

Foreigner is my favourite science fiction series. I’m so glad I got enjoy as many as I have. And regardless if …

Most people who care about fantasy have never read A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. This is a genuine gap in the canon.

Lewis didn’t just praise it, he said it was the direct inspiration for his Space Trilogy, and that it showed him imaginative fiction could carry real spiritual and philosophical weight. Tolkien was most certainly influenced by it. But when it was published in 1920 it sold so poorly that Lindsay spent the rest of his life in poverty, writing books almost no one bought, dying in obscurity in 1945.

In the novel a man named Maskull travels to the planet Tormance, a world orbiting Arcturus, where he visits a series of landscapes that are less like science fiction settings and more like states of consciousness. Lindsay was building a complete Gnostic cosmology, the material world as prison, the self as something to be dismantled rather than fulfilled, beauty as a trap set by a being called Crystalman. Every time someone dies in the novel they grin. That detail …

I did not read much Pratchett until the last 3-5 years, but I happened to be going through Discworld when my father passed away suddenly in March of 2023. It sounds like hyperbole, but I’m pretty sure Discworld saved my life during those first few months.

I will always be grateful for Pratchett’s unique mix of warmth, wit, and a fierce determination to make the world a better place.

“Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.”

- Thief of Time, 2001

GNU, Sir Terry.

Extra points if the media in question is intentionally inaccurate or adapts the mythology in a wild way.

Love me some vampires. Maybe not the ones from Twilight, though I guess they still count! Dracula is one of my favourite novels; I love thinking of the horror-struck Victorians reading it for the first time, not already being aware of the vampire tropes that permeate our modern field of media.

So, which have been your favourites? Books, movies, tv shows (yes, I know of and mostly like True Blood), graphic novels, etc. I can’t get enough of good vampires.

Update: Thank you!!! I did not expect this to get as much traction as it did. I have lots more vampire media to consume thanks to all of you! 🥳🧛🏼

I had recently picked a book at random because it was lying around at my parents and the Japanese Heian period theme seemed interesting.

It’s well researched but quite early in the book there was a sex scene that felt not only inappropriate (young widow kisses her drowned husband’s sex) but followed by over flowery prose and bizarre descriptions .

“Mistakes happen” I thought and read on. But two chapter later, another sex scene with improbable acts (no kink shaming, but noses are not typically used as dildos) and weird similes.

I started checking online, and too my relief , the author (70+ at the time , so he had sex before but maybe forgot) was the 2019 recipient of the “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” awarded by the Literary Review.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Review#Bad_Sex_in_Fiction_Award

The easy question is what are your nominees for that award? Apparently they stopped given the numbers of books qualifying..

The real question is what, for you , …

My 9-year-old is reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway to me as part of bedtime. It’s maybe the 3rd one he has read to me or his mother.

These books have done nothing but induce anxiety in me. It’s like some form of second-hand embarrassment or trauma. This specific volume describes a family vacation tropical getaway, and from the moment they get to the airport, through the whole plane ride, into the resort… it’s just a laundry list of every single possible thing that can go wrong or mildly annoying…or even significantly annoying. The seats between a couple with a baby, the bathroom, food poisoning, booked up resort activities, pests…

Take any and every stereotypical situation, and this book just launches itself through them one by one in an epic saga of incompetence, annoyance, bad luck, poor planning, logistical difficulty, inconsiderate people, or bad karma. It’s the vacation from Hell-Lite–just stressful enough, but not …

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So I just finished this book by Alastair Reynolds. I would first like to mention that this was my first book by Alastair Reynolds and I will say I liked it.

The book is set in a universe where there are various families called “Line” consisting of clones called Shatterlings. These shatterlings are clones of specific individuals from millions of years in the past, from an era where humans lived in the Golden Hour. The Golden hour being the space around the sun having diameter of one light hour. The book focuses on a specific Line known as the Gentian Line, which consists of 1000 clones of Abigail Gentian.

Back in the golden hour it was decided by individuals of great families to make clones of themselves and spread them across the galaxy to further the reaches of humanity and explore the known universe. So these Shatterlings travel the galaxy in their highly advanced ships collecting data about the known universe. The shatterlings have lifespans of million of …

This novel has a pretty riveting third act and some fantastic plot twists (especially the battle in the darkness and the droplet sequence), and the first book has some pretty similar strengths with an excellent mystery to boot. But my god you have to push through some of the worst shit ever published to get to the good parts.

- Paper thin characters, this was already a huge problem with the first book but I was told to push on because it supposedly gets better. It does not, as the second one has an even more insufferable protagonist with a cast of rotating nobodies that are impossible to care for. For a story all about the future of humanity it’s pretty crazy how inhuman and unrelatable these characters are.

- The dialogue is bad, really really bad. Nobody in the real world talks even remotely like how the characters do in this series. I’ve seen some people excuse this as being a cultural thing and I can absolutely assure you that it’s not as someone who’s …

So I’ve been reading my way through the Culture series, I’ve read Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and I’m most of my way through Excession right now, but I wondered if I was perhaps getting a different feel for the society as the prevailing consensus seems to be.

From my read, the meat part of the Culture seems to be relatively emotionally stunted, they don’t seem to form close personal relationships with friends or family, the only people who seem to work towards anything outside of substance abuse are the people who work for Contact and SC, and in those roles they tend to be manipulated like pieces on a chessboard by the Minds and other machine intelligences who seem to treat them like novelties or pets, and in many cases don’t have much hesitation to sacrifice potentially millions of lives in the pursuit of essentially personal projects or power grabs. I remember reading for example a line in Excession that notes art and artists weren’t common …

It’s been one of those books that pops up in all recommendation threads and it’s been on my to read list for a long time. It sounded over-hyped tbh, no pun intended. So i guess i went in skeptical, but i made sure not getting any spoilers or hints about what to expect.

For context, i’ve read most of the big universe building sagas, Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds, Rajaniemi, Asher and many many others, including most classics.

One of the positives i found to my surprise was the storytelling structure - the sub-stories weaving wordlbuilding, tieing the story loosely together and converging towards the finale was a nice experience. Although i have to say the last story ( apparently the one Simmons wrote first ) was the most jarring jumping around and incoherent. Also some of those stories dragged on way more than they needed to - overall the quality of individual stories was quite hit or miss

For the negatives, in my head: it’s really not much of a science fiction, …

When I was teenager I read the first two novels in the trilogy. I remember loving the first one because it felt like a High Fantasy/Neolithic/Conan-styled adventure, only with superior prose and a vivid sense of place.

I have no memories of the second novel, though I recall finding it a chore (I had no patience, and rather simple tastes back in those days).

I picked up a copy of the trilogy recently (zany covers included above), and am planning to read it, and was wondering what you guys think of the trilogy? From what I’ve read online, Aldiss was a bit disappointed with the trilogy’s reception. He put massive effort into the books, but they got a lukewarm response, and didn’t make much waves.

Off-topic: I’m also searching for a novel or novel series whose title I’ve forgotten. The novel (or series) was set on a nature reserve planet, or a planet that was part of a conservation project. I believe the novel (or series) was written in the 1980s or 90s. I …

How do think it holds up as a novel? Was a good novelist? I think this was his only shot at fiction. Does it hold up? Is worth the journey?

After all, 22 years after the end of Friends, the actress and her costars—including Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc—are still bringing in about $20 million a year in residuals when the show is re-aired, according to *The Time*s. 

And Lisa has one theory as to why they’re getting so much in fees, quipping to the outlet in an interview published April 23, “Because Phoebe Buffay was so great?”

In all seriousness, the 62-year-old has another idea about why the show has stuck with fans all these years later, noting she rewatched *Friends* after Matthew Perry died in 2023 from the acute effects of ketamine.

“After Matthew died I watched the show again,” Lisa shared. “Before, I only saw what I did wrong or could have done better. But for the first time I truly appreciated just how great it was.”[](https://www.eonline.com/news/1431399/lisa-kudrow-on-friends-writers-behavior)

“I felt I did OK, but Jennifer and Courteney? Amazing,” she raved. “David and Matt? …

As originally envisioned, the historical action epic Desert Warrior would be a film of groundbreaking firsts. It would be the first Hollywood-style tentpole movie shot entirely on location in Saudi Arabia under its de facto supreme ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030, a.k.a. the culture-washing governmental push intended to liberate Saudi society from its “addiction” to oil through soft-power alternatives like tourism and entertainment. Directed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes filmmaker Rupert Wyatt and starring Marvel Cinematic Universe stalwart Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War), Desert Warrior would also be the inaugural movie project to shoot at Neom Media, a state-of-the-art, multibazillion-dollar media complex and studio backlot attached to Neom City, a metropolis bordering the Red Sea.

But when cameras began to roll in September 2021, neither Neom nor the country’s moviemaking infrastructure was quite ready for its Hollywood …