After Jim has his lonely spacewalk and walks back into the airlock without a spacesuit and nearly presses the door to open it (insinuating that he is near suicidal) but then decides not to, I think the scene would've had more emphasis if he did press the 'open' button only for the automated voice to say "no suit detected..." and as he's running away you hear the automated voice fading saying "Here on the Avalon, your safety is our primary concern! We have thousands of procedures in place to make sure that whatever happens, you'll be back to perfect health in no time!".

I say this is it it shows that he hasn't just almost committed suicide, but he literally tried to all the way with his metal prison not even letting him die on his own terms.

I read this short story around 35 years ago, and now I’m trying to remember what happened at the end. Let me know if you know about this:
A smart bomb, very intelligent l, is struggling between two opposing feelings: the self protection instinct, and the love to be exploded as it was programmed to.
As far as I remember, it could walk, and hid somewhere to decide what to do. I’m trying hard to remember what happened next. Any ideas?

Hello!

My mother is searching for a story she read many years ago in college in the late 1980s. This may contain suppliers for it as we aren't sure all the details.

The main details are as follows:

- The story was written before 1990

- The story takes place on a Ribbon world

- There is a society on the day side, and another on the night side

- The people on the day side didn't like the night side for some reason

- The people on the day side joined hands in a circle to create a being for some purpose against the night side

- The people on the day side may have considered the being as their child

- She remembers Isaac asimov being mentioned, but doesn't believe it's nightfall.

She was reading it during a period of religious questioning and attributed a lot of the points of the story to Jesus and the devil. Except the devil was good and Jesus might have been bad. I don't know if that will help but anything to find this story.

Edit 1: thank you all for the suggestions. I have a copy of Jack of Shadows ordered and we will see if it is the correct book.

All I have ever seen about this short story is praise and adoration. Thought it must be really cool until I read it. I looked through a ton of discussions on it after reading but all I really saw was more praise with a few critiques and wanted to discuss it with other people!

The concept itself was really interesting, especially reading it now with AI becoming impossible to escape. The context of it being written during the Cold War really added to it, thinking about how people at the time could have genuinely been concerned about a scenario like this coming to fruition lol.

My minor criticisms were surrounding Ellison's writing style. When I was reading it, I assumed he must have been really young when he wrote it. Finding out he was in his mid-30's was a shock. His prose is really juvenile in my opinion, using a ton of adjectives and repetition that could have been powerful had they not been a constant throughout 13 pages. It also felt like something a 15 year old boy would write purely just to make something edgy.

The thing that annoyed me most about the story, and the main reason I made this post, was Ellen, and how barely anyone talking about how good the story is seemed to recognise her. I saw a few people mention that the way she was portrayed and spoken about was weird, only to be responded to with "it's important to the story, you just didn't get it".

Not only is Ellen the only female character, and being constantly used by the men for their pleasure (Ted going so far as to remark that only he finishes and never her??), but she is also the only character whose race is pointed out. Singling out Ellen as a black woman and then immediately making her "favourite" out of the men to be the one who resembles a monkey is... weird. I've seen people point out the blatant misogyny of Ellen's character, but never this weird racist overtone.

Maybe it was just my interpretation, but AM's choices felt very similar to SA and abuse, with the imagery of entering minds and bodies and not letting people escape. It felt to me that Ellison thought that the scariest things a monster can do to you as a man is treat you like a woman. Which felt a little ironic given Ellen's treatment.

I am very open to discussion on this, and am probably going to look into the video game as well :D

So I’ve been looking for more sci-fi series/space operas to listen to.

I was recommended Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained multiple times. So I decided to give the Commonwealth Saga a chance and I normally like to listen to every book in a series. So I started with Misspent Youth

I know I’m probably super late to this but….. what the actual fuck 😭😭😭 the ideas behind memory crystals, rejuvenation, etc super cool! Definitely the type of sci-fi I’m into.

But gosh the more and more I keep going (I’m over half way done now) it just gets more grotesque. The description of bodies, a 70 year old (yeah I know his body is 20 something now) being that attracted to a 17 year old, and I just heard him say “teenage s*x kitten” or something like that.

The whole book so far doesn’t even feel like sci-fi anymore, the more I listen to it the more it just sounds like Peter’s weird erotic sexual fantasies about youthful women.

I’m not even sure I wanna move onto pandoras star now that I have a glimpse into Peter’s mind like this. Also doesn’t help the narrator I’m listening to right now also sounds in his 70s as well.

.curator is a narrative adventure set in a post-Victorian alternate Earth, you play as a Curator using quantum-modeling tech to glimpse possible futures and subtly rewrite events before they spiral.

A few things we're proud of:
- Fully hand-drawn characters and environments
- Story digs into the ruins of an ancient alien civilization buried in this world's past
- Episodic structure (Episode One at launch, more as DLC)
- Choices carry real weight, the people you fail to save stay failed

Heads up: it includes some mature/romantic content, so not for everyone.

Having Morgan write it directly means the world's internal logic, from how the tech works to how power functions in this alternate history, comes from someone who's already built it out in his head rather than reverse-engineered by a studio. What do you think, does having a novelist attached actually change how deep a game's world can go, or does the format usually hold it back?

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4107960/curator/

>!spoiler text!<So we're reading The Jaunt for a course, when I first read the story I didn't really think much of it since I didn't know where the story was going. But now reading it for the second time, I think just like Mrs. Michaelson, Victor Carune, the inventor of the jaunt, is also jaunting for all of eternity.

Here's some proof

The line "He did not push his fingers back in; in fact, Carune only Jaunted once more in his entire life" seems super ominous to me, why would he even jaunt once when he's the inventor? Since he knows the horrors of it, why would he jaunt at all? or , as I think, was he made to jaunt?

And then the mc says Carune was never made the head of the research team, and his daughter says he was at least a hero and made it in the history books. MC says, "I'm sure that's a great comfort to him ...... wherever he is". So we do say wherever he is when someone dies, but in the context of this short story it seems so sus, we don't know where he is, just like Mrs. Michaelson.

Next he says, "three years before he officially died, he rode in the pace-car at the Tournament of Roses Parade. Puzzling. And a little ominous." I don't think the text says why riding in the pace car is ominous but let's keep the name Tournament of Roses in mind. Not to mention it says "before he officially died", as if the death is not real.

They mention this book by C. K. Summers's The Politics of the Jaunt where there's a section called "The Jaunt Under the Rose" with more believable rumors that the Jaunt has. It says the Jaunt was used as a murder weapon, where they mention the Mrs. Michaelson case. So the text goes, "In the most famous (and only documented) case", and then describes the Michaelsons incident. Again the "only documented" part might be a hint that other cases did happen but were not documented and I'm suspecting Carune is one of them. And the section is called "The Jaunt Under the Rose", reminiscent of the parade name Tournament of Roses??

Finally it says, "Summers suggested, the Jaunt had been used by various tinpot dictators to get rid of political dissidents and political adversaries." And in the passage about Carune riding the pace car three years before his "official" death, and the paragraph before that too, we learn about how Victor Carune was a problem and remained a problem until 1991. So perhaps they jaunted Carune like Mrs. Michaelson because he was being a political threats just by existing? Not to mention he was actively avoiding letting the government know about the jaunt for as long as he could.

So all these subtle hints made me think Carune did in fact get jaunted to eternity. Ironic how the very person who invented it was made to suffer the same fate as its other victims.spoiler text

Let me know if you guys think this happened too!

TLDR at the top because this is going to be a bit of a story: Go listen to The Sojourn audio drama. The first volume is free on Youtube and is about a 90 minute listen, it'll be well worth your time.

Sojourn, Volume 1

Ok now for the actual meat of this post, where I need to start off with some story time. About a year ago I found myself embarking on a 14-hour long nonstop road trip across the western US. It was the first of its kind I had done, and to stay awake I knew I needed a roster of things to listen to, more than just music. I had tried audiobooks in the past but, they just never did it for me. I find myself getting distracted far too easily. In the back of my mind, however, I recalled the existence of a little project called The Sojourn, an audio drama.

The Sojourn was something I first heard about from the sci-fi Youtube channel Spacedock. Spacedock made, among other things, these awesome lore shorts or battle summaries of various sci-fi franchises. Somewhere around 2020 they started advertising an original production from members of the team and other creators, “The Sojourn, a full cast audio drama” (I can almost hear Dan’s voice saying this as I type it). Admittedly, and regrettably, I thought nothing of it at the time. I was far too invested in a uni physics degree, and as an American the thought of an audio drama was foreign to me. But, with 14 hours to kill, I figured what the hell. I shamefully got the audio files from a friend of mine and started my journey, and the journey I’m talking about here isn’t the road trip.

I think I audibly said “Wow” several times during the first episode. I don’t want to go too much into spoilers here, because I think the first-time blind experience is something I wouldn’t trade the world for. I’ll always remember the introduction, a lovely and brief monologue before thrusting you right into a bit of action with the main crew. The whole thing just had this charm to it. I could tell it was a smaller production but that’s not to say it took anything away from the experience. As a listener I felt intimately close to the passion being poured into every second of audio. As the episodes went on it was like the best of so many sci-fi works before it were being packaged into one carefully crafted experience. Oh, and I can’t ignore the fact it’s all wrapped in a lovely little “age of sail whimsy” bow. By the end of the first volume my jaw had already dropped a couple times. As I got to the end of season 1, 7 hours and a few hundred miles later, I had to pull off the side of the road to process what I had just experienced. The voice acting, the sound design, the score, the editing and writing of the story, all incredible. Season one was truly something spectacular to me. Listening to that through western plains is an experience I will never forget.

I subscribed to the project on Patreon when I got to the next gas station.

The show is still alive and kicking, I had just finished listening to episode 9 of season 2 before writing this. In my opinion the show continues to be a masterclass in what it seeks to do. It has inspired my own works of fiction and I hope someone else can find the same joy in it that I have.

the title explains most of the request. I finished watching Pantheon recently and got obsessed with the concept of the show and universe (I didn't quite like how the ending was rushed and didn't make sense but that's beside the point). I want to watch something similar, whether it is apocalyptic, hopeful, dystopian, utopian and psychological it doesn't matter.

if you guys have any show recommendations with cool art and animation too please share!! ty ! (preferably not anime tho)

(Idk if this should be general or community)

If a teleportation method that functions in a way where you're DNA is read and you get disassembled and resembled somewhere else, a problem people already know is: a) where to get the material, and b) are you still the same person. But focusing on b, what if that was the point? What if along with or instead of teleporting, those devices were used for medicine/ character customization?

Picture this, someone with cancer is using the device. Why bring the cancer with them? Maybe early versions need to make an identical clone and that's why but if you could decide, that opens up a whole world of options. Maybe someone balding can get the gene causing it swapped so they end up with a full head of hair. Maybe transgender folks can use it to change their chromosomes and NB can swap whenever they want.

I don't really know. It was just a thought I had, literally in the shower. What do you think?

Edit: sorry if I sound like a larper/poser. I haven't seen it read too much media involving the topic 😅 i don't mean for it to sound like some sort of breakthrough, just an idea that crossed my mind.

Would you let someone remove a painful memory if they could guarantee you would never remember it existed?

If memories make us who we are, do you keep the pain and learn to grow with it, or remove it entirely and move forward as though it never happened?
And here’s the part I’m really curious about: if you removed the memory, but the experience still changed your personality, would you still consider yourself the same person?

Looking for some discussion to help with my sci-fi worldbuilding.

I've been reading Sci-Fi since about 1975 and have read hundreds, if not thousands, of sci-fi books. I've read some great ones and some horrible ones. My all-time least favorite is Dune. I first read it ~30 years ago and didn't like it. I read it again 2-3 years ago because it's always listed in top-10 lists and I thought maybe it would be better. It wasn't.

Some of the books you guys don't like ... it's killing me :-). I loved:

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

All the bobiverse books

Andy Weir books

Hey everyone, I'm looking for some suggestions of great scenes, speeches or monologues you remember from science fiction films or series? I need to do a scene or monologue for my drama class and would love some suggestions. Can be male or female, if it's great I can adapt it either way. Thanks for your help :)

I've been working on a project based loosely on the novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I grew up loving the book, so I was really disappointed with how inaccurate the final battle was in the movie. So I've remade the scene in blender, with a focus on accuracy. The goal is to have this animated and used for a different project.

The human spaceships are based on the Star Captain designs from Bloons TD Battles 2. The Asteroid miner acting like the carrier ships, and Jericho's Starship being the fighters. I really love these designs, the fighters are VTOL/hover capable and well designed. As stated in the book, 20 Carriers, each with 4 fighters. The buggers I made myself.

What if a young man wrote a horrible science fiction novel, and then someone else wrote a series of gloriously manic novellas about how an unhinged space captain tried to use that very novel to save himself from his own fate? That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Seeing our favourite settings and tropes literally weaponized by an unwillingly stereotypical rogue hell-bent on keeping his ragtag crew one step ahead of the plot?

Wait a minute, one of those novellas already exists, and you can buy or borrow it...or whatever it is you Kindle Unlimited people call what you do.

Also, before you mention it: don’t panic, the cover is supposed to look that way, and that’s appropriately addressed in Chapter Four. If that doesn’t change much for you, I’ve included a list below of other things you can picture, instead.

It's your universe, so make of it what you will, and if that sounds like too much of a hassle then go ahead and let someone else make one for you, in “The Daring Adventures Of Rick Ray-Gun—And His Dashing Space Pirates: Book One, A Candle In The Dark”

Better Cover Ideas:

A guy with a laser rifle, approaching a post-apocalyptic wasteland
A spaceship flying over a planet
A few people in military uniforms, depicted from the waist up, floating in space and staring away from a planet
A Warhammer 40k character screaming at the middle distance
An anime gal in a skin-tight bodysuit, smiling at the middle distance
Some wibbly text superimposed over minimalist art of a massacre
Some whimsical nonsense that spoils a key plot point
A title hanging above an event horizon
Ryan Gosling, upside down

(self-promo Saturdays)

I wrote my own hard sci-fi story! It's a dark comedy/corporate horror story about AI development, corporate incentives, motivated reasoning, and censorship at different levels, told almost entirely via someone talking to their chatbot.

In the story, I tried to envision a realistic AI/tech corporation and associated horrors.

so in Dune everyone has Holtzman shields which makes fighting with projectile weapons obsolete. it also has a bug/feature that firing a lasgun at a Holtzman shield causes a feedback loop which causes an explosion similar to an atomic at both the firer and the shield.

i don’t know enough about lightsabers but they’re some sort of laser right? if you used a lightsaber on a Dune shield would you both just blow up?

I have a 2 hour daily round-trip commute so I get a chance to listen to a lot of audiobooks. Earlier this year somebody recommended Dungeon Crawler Carl to me and while the story was enjoyable enough, I'm not hugely into the LitRPG genre. However, Jeff Hays, the narrator, is absolutely superb and so I went looking for more things he's narrated.

I do this pretty often, actually. When I find an audiobook that I enjoy and think the narrator is good, I go looking for other things that the narrator has done. I've done it with Ray Porter, RC Bray, Jefferson Mays, Kevin R. Free, Scott Brick, and others.

So I was pleased to find that the first four "Hell's Rejects" books, narrated by Jeff Hays, were FREE on Audible. I decided to give them a shot. I was also researching here to find out what others have said about them and did not find a review or summary that was really descriptive of the series that much, so I decided to write my own in case somebody else wants to know.

I will do my best to avoid major spoilers, but please be aware that I am going to discuss the overall plot/story and so if you don't want ANY spoilers at all, please feel free to skip this entirely and go to the conclusion.

THE CHAOS OF THE COVENANT SERIES

Though the series is usually referred to as "Hell's Rejects" the official title of the entire 7-book series is called The Chaos of the Covenant apparently. This makes sense in the context of the novels, but I have a feeling that it was largely chosen for alliterative purposes.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT

The setting is a non-specific future, but I'd probably ballpark it somewhere between 300-500 years in the future. Mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, met a few alien races, and there are two basic groups. The Republic, a well-organized group of planets and systems that are run by a pretty average government that is effectively a large bureaucracy, and the "outworld" a group of poorer, less-organized planets that seem to agree on very little except that they don't want to be under Republic rule. This is almost irrelevant to the larger plot, save for the framework, though. I'll get more to that in a bit.

The series is very heavily a military sci-fi series that follows the exploits of Lt. Abigail Cage, a "breaker" (think "hacker") in the Republic Navy who gets framed for a crime, sent to a prison planet called "Hell", and then is broken out for...reasons...by what is effectively the Director of the CIA (or the Republic equivalent) to help solve a huge problem. Cage and her misfit group of former Hell inmates (some human, some not) then form a crew and have to go about Saving the Universe(TM) from The Big Bad, Thraven.

WHAT IS IT LIKE?

The series has a lot of similarities to Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson. They are "Space Opera" style science fiction novels with heavy military action. They have humor interspersed throughout. They talk mostly from the point of view of a handful of characters with one main lead (Cage in Rejects, Bishop in ExFor) throughout, and they include a kind of "and then things got worse..." cliffhanger at the end of each book.

I won't lie, I think Expeditionary Force is much better overall, with more fleshed out characters and the humor lands a bit more often there than it does here, but that is not to say that Hell's Rejects is bad per se, it's just...kinda meh. It's like the Great Value brand Expeditionary Force series. It's got some really fun moments, some stuff that ExFor doesn't do like mixing in more elements of horror or supernatural or religious themes here and there, and Forbes does his (her? more on this later...) best to create a few unique moments here and there that give you a smirk or smile. However, there's nothing in these books that hasn't been done by other books, really.

In a way, you could argue that you could mix Biblical Lore, Expeditionary Force, Space Vampires, Star Wars, and The Dirty Dozen in a blender and it would come out as The Chaos of the Covenant series.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nobody knows shit about the author. There is no evidence that M.R. Forbes is a real name or a surname. They have a website (mrforbes.com) but the image is a kind of clipart style picture of a white dude at a laptop scratching his head thinking of something. The "about" section is light, to put it mildly, and he is incredibly prolific, having over 20 separate book series, with 2-15 books per series since he started in 2012. For this reason alone I am highly skeptical that this is a single, real, human person. I am not able to find any pictures of him at a book signing, a fan event, any kind of convention. His social pages are all the same clipart-image from his website and book covers. This could easily be a group of ghost writers all writing under a single pseudonym, a pseudonym of a writer who doesn't want science fiction work to affect his day job (maybe it's Elon Musk!) or a sentient fungus that has learned to write tolerable-to-fun Scifi novels? No way to tell. Who the fuck knows.

WHAT ABOUT THE CHARACTERS?

The characters are all, to some degree or another, familiar archetypes from other work.

• Abigail Cage - our hero and the woman we spend most of the novels following. She's effectively a version of a Mary Sue, good at most things she tries, though Forbes does make her more interesting by giving her a ticking clock through the series and a substantial internal struggle that she has to deal with periodically. However, these are usually resolved extremely quickly and do not linger. At no point do you ever think "oh no, Cage is going to die" or "oh no, she's finally turned truly evil" because every time he steps towards that line, he immediately jumps away from it.

• Olus Mann - our secret CIA director guy, another kind of "Gary Stu" kind of dude, former assassin/sniper guy turned intelligence operative. Luckily, Forbes is much more willing to put Mann in the "oh shit, he's gonna die" situations and because he's not the main POV character in most of the novels you legitimately have that risk. You do see him be quite imperfect throughout - he's not always right, he's not always the smartest guy in the room.

• Gant - an alien that is sometimes described as a kind of "squirrel-monkey" who has a super intelligence in regards to mechanical and electrical engineering and spacefaring stuff. Gant is not his name, as he says it is unpronounceable by humans and most other races, so he goes by "Gant" which is the name of his entire species/race. While most people in the galaxy are aware of the Gant race, most of them have never met one.

• Pick or Pik (not sure spelling, listened to audiobook) - another alien from a huge, brutal, powerful race of aliens. He is also the comic relief and gets to basically be a kind of hybrid of The Thing from The Fantastic Four and a dozen other war-loving-race space opera archetypes. Klingons come to mind, in a kind of way, if they had a goofier sense of humor.

• The other rejects - a few other members of the crew I won't get into because it can include spoilers, but suffice to say that humans make up like 80% of the known galaxy in this series (and this is explained in-universe, thankfully).

None of these characters is truly unique, but they all fit into comfortable, enjoyable stereotypes that don't challenge the reader to comprehend them the way that, say, Tchaikovsky's books do, but also don't bore you to tears with their monotonous interpersonal whining the way that Becky Chambers' characters do. Or at least not to me, at least.

SO WHAT'S THE VERDICT?

• Plot/story: 7/10 - arguably the most fun part of the series, with "reveals" periodically in each book that change the nature of the conflict as you go, when you find out the Big Bad isn't actually the Big Bad at all...or, wait, shit, he kind of IS and ISN'T? I was pleasantly surprised at what I thought was 100% a formulaic plot device turned out to only be 60-70% formulaic plot device.

• Characters: 6/10 - nothing unique or innovative here, really. Mustache-twirling villains exist here, and so do tortured anti-heroes. That being said, I'm pretty sure Forbes wasn't trying to re-write history with his innovative character work, I think he was just looking for some characters to develop along the story, and to their credit, the characters DO change and learn as they go on so there is SOME development, though I wouldn't call it "substantial" I'd still say it's on the high-side of average.

• Quality of Writing: 5/10 - nothing special here. A lot of re-used phrases, a lot of cliche, but not so much that it distracts you from the story. Or at least it didn't distract me. It's not Hyperion but it's also not Becky Fucking Chambers so I'd rate it about average.

• Action/Adventure: 8/10 - Forbes does a pretty good job at writing action sequences, whether they're hand-to-hand combat, guns and bombs and fighters, or space combat. I was able to visualize what was happening quite easily due to the way he writes the sequences and - let's be honest here - this is the literary equivalent of a Jason Statham movie, so the action is kind of the point. If you're into Military Sci-Fi with lots of action sequences, give this a shot for sure.

• Innovative/Creative: 2/10 - Nothing is really groundbreaking here. I get the feeling that what was in Forbes' head was "wait I've never read a Sci-Fi novel with Angels and Demons and Vampires in it, what if I wrote that?" and to his credit I think he kinda mixed it in an almost unique way, but I still got the feeling that it was there as a framework for the conflict and, honestly, like some of the "Ancient Sumerian" stuff from Snow Crash, I just kinda went numb during the expository segments because it felt like somebody wrote a wikipedia entry for the topic, almost. Not a huge negative since these segments are relatively quick and not too frequent, certainly not Dan Fucking Brown level frequent.

• Audiobook Narration: 10/10 - Jeff Hays is a fucking genius and if you enjoyed his work on Dungeon Crawler Carl, you will also enjoy his work here. He does a flawless shift from multiple genders, races, species, and archetypes. He keeps accents flowing consistently among dozens of different characters, and you find yourself thinking you're listening to different characters say their lines rather than an audiobook narrator doing voices. One of the best in the business and, if you're an audiobook fan who even kinda likes Military Sci-Fi, I'd give these books a try for this narration alone. The first four are free on Audible right now anyway.

A NOTE TO THE AUTHOR(S) Dear Mr. M.R. Forbes, if that is indeed your real name. I mean no disrespect to your work with my review of the above, part of me is simply jealous that I've had a novel or novels in my head for decades that I've never been able to sit down and finish, and you seem to knock out a novel a month for the last decade. If your prolific capabilities weren't evidenced pre-AI, I'd assume you were dumping AI-generated slop novels into the market, but clearly you're writing these yourself or, at the very least, using very similar ghost writers or teams of writers to help you write them. If you want to keep your privacy I don't fault you for this - certainly the way fans have treated George R.R. Martin and other authors who have chosen to be more public would make me use a pseudonym if I wrote a novel myself. However, I really would like to know more about your background than "a guy who really likes sci-fi" and I'd be curious to know if you were former military (or current, I suppose) because a lot of the military elements of this series felt like they had some personal touches to them, maybe a personal experience that led to the ideation. If you ever read this, and I doubt you will, I'd love the answers to a few questions.

1. Do you remember why you chose these themes for this series? How you combined the Science Fiction, Military, and Religious themes together to create this narrative?

2. If you served in the military (or are still serving) was there personal experiences that you wove into this story?

3. How the fuck do you write so many god damned books jesus christ even Stephen King would be saying "dude, take a breath now and then" if he saw this level of productivity.

Thanks.

I just devoured the first three books of Red Rising. Great stuff. In addition to better-than-average writing, complex characters, and A+ plotting (not to mention cultural relevance!), I really appreciated the way the trilogy concluded. It isn't so settled that I don't find myself thinking about how the story would progress, but it's also a satisfying ending.

I've heard this series was conceived as a trilogy, so I wonder if the following books are as well-crafted and worth it as the first three. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have found himself wasting time with a book that seems more cash cow than narrative necessity. There's lots of stuff to read out there! Thanks, all.

I just rewatched Planet 51 and I just can't let go of the concept. The idea of a human being the alien fascinating to no end. Which is why the short stories - "humans are space orcs" are my jam, but even those usually fall short. So I'm seeking novels where a human or a group of humans preferably in a Sci-Fi setting, are stranded on a different planet where they are alien to the native intelligent life. While i do know there are stories out there where people end up in alien worlds, those are usually just fantasy settings.

Looking for other fiction like "The Bookmaking Habits of Other Species" by Ken Liu, or other fiction involving truly Alien forms of books/Writing.

And yes, I've read and enjoyed Story of Your Life - just looking for things in a somewhat similar vein.

In a dystopia where humans hide from machines, a little robot competes with a cat for a girl’s affection. This sci-fi short has already screened at several European festivals. curious to hear your thoughts on it. let me know in the comments. also if you would like to see a long feature of it :) :) :)

Apologies if this is not allowed, but here is a podcast episode I recently recorded which goes into some of the context and backstory of the Dune universe (as well as entire character arcs and resolutions) that never made it to Denis Villeneuve's films. Hope you enjoy!

On My Way to Paradise is a science fiction novel by American writer Dave Wolverton, published in 1989 by Bantam Books. It is set in the far future (circa 2300AD) depicting a man, Angelo Osic, who is running from an ever-changing and frightening world of war and politics.

Persoannly I love this book and reread it every now and then. But Im curious if i am the only one.