Tag: SF

Embassytown by China Miéville

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This entry is part 48 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts get published with some lag. I’m trying to be more punctual, though, and this one’s very recent. I’ve had the audiobook for Embassytown in my Audible account for quite a long time now, but I’ve been off audiobooks for quite a long time. These days, I’ve driving more than I used to, so I’ve had the chance to listen to a few. I’m not sure this is the best medium for the novel—it has a lot of neologisms, and I didn’t catch the implied meaning of a few of them—but …

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More Prodigal News… and a Blowfish in a Pear Tree

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With the intensive courses I’ve been teaching, I haven’t had time to reflect much on 2016, or all the stuff that happened last year. (And since today’s my wedding anniversary, I won’t be doing it now.) I’ll have a little time for things like that soon—after my courses end and I get the grades uploaded, sometime next week or early on during the week after—but for now, some happy news: I’ve finally received my contributor’s copy of the December 2016 issue of Analog! Pretty exciting. I’ve actually had it for about a week, but have been too busy to mention it here. In …

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The Cosplayers of the Late Ming Dynasty

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Wait… cosplay? In the late Ming Dynasty? Apparently, yes. And I don’t just mean dressing up in costumes, which is a universal and ancient activity. I mean cosplay. What’s the difference? I’ll let Jonathan Spence lay out the dots, before I connect them. Here’s a passage from Return to Dragon Mountain: After his dismissal by the prince of Lu, [Zhang Dai’s] father returned to Shaoxing in early 1632 just before the region was smitten with a prolonged drought, which badly damaged crops and led to the threat of famine. For both father and son the ordinary fabric of life was starting to unravel. Zhang Dai, …

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Partially Recovered: Stellar Region

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This is probably of limited interest to most readers, aside from tabletop RPG fans. (Basically, I recovered (from the Wayback Machine) a snapshot from a time one and a half decades ago, when I was running an online turn-based tabletop roleplaying game–sort of–by email, without all the amazing resources available to RPG enthusiasts today.)

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Recent Books

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I’ve been reading a fair bit this year, as far as my standards go. More than usual, anyway. This is everything so far, though, of course, a few of those I gave up on and didn’t finish: I’ve been feeling a little disappointed lately in how so much of the SFF world online is so busy talking about scandals and outrages that we never seem to talk about the books anymore. Short stories, too, but, well, that’s for another post. So I figured: do my bit. Post about what I’ve read lately. Part of why I stopped was because–on some very bad …

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