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...
First, I will list the stories by year, giving a short description and review of each. WARNING: SPOILERS 1970- "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel Delany - This is a literary science fiction tale of thief and master impersonator, known by aliases that all have the initials H.C.E., rising from being a lowly crook to a wealthy criminal overlord in a vibrant interplanetary underworld. He is being pursued by the Interplanetary Secret Service Agent, Maud Hinkle , who mysteriously knows about his past, present, and future. We follow H.C.E.'s life using monthly criminal code words based on semi-precious stones, The story introduces the concept of holographic information storage which can unravel a person's entire life trajectory using a single date point. It brings up questions of self-determination and the surveillance state. This was my favorite story from the 1970's because the world Delaney created comes alive and the questions about ...
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