Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
Adrian Tchaikovsky announced the other day that he and Emma Newman were starting a new podcast: Starship Alexandria, where they will take turns recommending sci-fi and fantasy books, with most of the episode devoted to discussing them. Their first episode dropped a couple of weeks ago, and Newman made the first recommendation: The Kraken Wakes … Continue reading The Kraken Wakes
What would aliens look like? Not just another intelligent species, but alien animals, or entire ecosystems? It's very hard for us to imagine them without falling back on variations of Earth animals. So aliens in sci-fi often look like insects, octopuses, or other species we're familiar with. To be sure, aliens would have evolved in … Continue reading Alien Clay
Children of Memory is the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's trilogy: Children of Time. This series chronicles the rise of an interstellar civilization. At the beginning of the series, humanity has begun projects to terraform several planets in other solar systems. The plan is to use a genetic virus to uplift (make sapient) an implanted … Continue reading Children of Memory
Last year I recommended Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, a novel about the far future involving a struggle between an interstellar ark of refugees from a dying Earth and an accidental civilization of uplifted spiders over the one terraformed world known to be available. Children of Ruin is a sequel, although a substantial portion of … Continue reading Recommendation: Children of Ruin
The Fermi Paradox is the observation that if intelligent life is pervasive in the universe, it should have arrived on Earth ages ago, but there is no evidence it ever did. The solutions to the paradox include the possibilities that interstellar travel is impossible (or so appallingly difficult that no one bothers), that there is … Continue reading Recommendation: Children of Time
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