Millions of years in the future, when the sun is dying, the Earth has become tidally locked and attached to the moon with cob-like webs make by giant spider looking plants. Half of the planet is always in the daytime and half is always night. Most life lives in the perpetual afternoon . Plants dominate, they hunt, they fly, they hop, they graze, they even fight battles with one another. Humans survived but they look little like the humans of today. They are smaller and have green skin and live in matriarchal tribes hopping through the branches of a giant Banyan tree trying to survive the last years of life on Earth. This is the setting of Hothouse by Brian Aldiss a story that begins as one of survival in the afternoon on Earth but ends up being a deep musing on intelligence and humanity. Hothouse was originally published as a group of short stories that won the Hugo Award for Short Fiction in 1962 . We follow a tribe of future humans as...
In the fall of 2023, I challenged myself to read 100 science fiction books. These are the best science fiction books I have read since I started this challenge. 1. Blindsight by Peter Watts What if consciousness is an evolutionary flaw? A crew of augmented humans, a biological vampire, and an AI in a not-so-distant future travel to the edge of the solar system to meet a mysterious alien intelligence called the Rorschach. The book asks questions about intelligence, consciousness, and the future of humanity. The book is hard science fiction and dense with scientific ideas and jargon. The characters are all augmented or evolved in various ways, each exploring different aspects of what it is to be human. The story is told from the point of view of Siri, a man who had half of his brain taken out as a child and who feels more like a machine. The ideas and story come together perfectly at the end, each of the characters reach their arcs...
WARNING: SOME SPOILERS A wandering planet (planet comes from the Greek word meaning wanderer!) appears in the sky near the moon and causes destruction around the Earth. We jump around the world to see how this global disaster affects different people. It seems to affect most in a very sensuous way. The wandering planet seems to make the people of the world seek to let their inhibitions go and become sexually free in a dated 1960's way. Older men seduce willing younger women in experimental ways. A man desires a cat alien from another species. Group relationships come out in the open. The scenes were probably fresh in 1964 but seem like they came out of an embarrassingly dated mod comedy today. Free sex and rampant sexism aren't the only dated parts of the novel. There is also racism. One of the characters is a member of the KKK and three of the non-white characters are drug addicts treated as comedy rel...
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