Inherit the Stars, by James P. Hogan, is one of the worst books I've ever read. Boring. Dated. Incredibly sexist. To call it hard SF is an insult to hard SF. The cardboard characters stand around talking to each other about science, but the science is almost all fake, so it's not very interesting. How did something this bad get published? Even more mysteriously, how does it get an average of 4.7 out of 5 stars in 74 amazon reviews?
#WrittenSF #SciFi #review

Paul Di Filippo at the Washington Post has a very positive review of Annalee Newitz’s new science fiction novel The Terraformers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/01/27/annalee-newitz-terraformers/
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I've reread Ringworld, by Larry Niven, and it felt pretty flat. I was about 12 years old when I first read it, so I guess it didn't bother me that a lot of it was so infantile, like the ultra-beautiful 20-year-old airhead falling in lust with the 200-year-old protagonist. The males are always proving how smart they are by solving puzzles whose solutions the author has put in their mouths. One-dimensional characters, no significant moral or intellectual content. Fakey science.
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I'm rereading Cordwainer Smith, in the two-volume Baen edition that puts them in order according to the chronology of his universe. Just read the famous "Scanners live in vain," and "The lady who sailed The Soul." Both of these, although fairly early in the sequence, are supposedly set in 9000 CE. I found them very difficult to enjoy because their extreme sexism is so clearly a representation of Smith's time and biases. They don't smell at all like 70 centuries in the future!
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Written culture is decaying. People expect any complex topic from ballet choreography to Sufi Islam to be boiled down for them into a 7-minute video. If the Sufi video has an animated Muhammad winking us, 10,000 people will post comments like, "Mind! Blown! Never knew Islams actually worship Jesus!"
Here's a story from 1956 that does a pretty good job of foretelling all this: https://archive.org/details/earthisroomenoug0000unse/page/164/mode/2up
#SciFi #WrittenSF #disinformation

I first read Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith, as a teenager around 1980, and thought it was great. Reread it a second time, thought it was dopey wish fulfillment for horny teenagers. Just finished rereading it again and really enjoyed it. Am I allowed to change my mind twice? The language is beautiful, the sense of wonder awesome. The juvenile wish fulfillment is mitigated because the boy is disabled and the plot revolves around his reevaluating his wishes.
#SciFi #WrittenSF

I'd heard some good things about The Genius Plague, an SF novel by David Walton. The premise involves a fungus from the Amazon jungle that invades your body and messes with your brain. I loved the first 100 pages. The bumbling first-person narrator was funny. The premise was far out, man.
But the rest of the book was yet one more shlocky rehash of Heinlein's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters. Heinlein at least made the logic work.
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@jcrabapple Thanks for posting that! Seems like a 10-to-1 ratio of fantasy to SF. #WrittenSF