11 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

I've just started reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson after finishing The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin.

I plan to read the entire Mars Trilogy.

I picked up Red Mars at the library some years ago but somehow it didn't grab me. Sometimes I circle back to a book years later and end up liking it. I'll be interested in your comments, if you post any.

7 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

You should see a mechanic, or perhaps a fishmonger.

I thought I did, but they turned out to be a tobacconist. I feel that the Poles, though mostly well-intentioned, deliberately put in unnecessary consonants to mess with foreigners. Had no effect on the Germans, of course.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

I picked up Red Mars at the library some years ago but somehow it didn't grab me. Sometimes I circle back to a book years later and end up liking it. I'll be interested in your comments, if you post any.

I thought I did, but they turned out to be a tobacconist. I feel that the Poles, though mostly well-intentioned, deliberately put in unnecessary consonants to mess with foreigners. Had no effect on the Germans, of course.

I vill not buy zees tobacconist, it is scratched.

Edited March 27Mar 27 by exchemist

Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This confirms all my darkest suspicions about Zuckerberg and his sidekick, the horrible Sheryl Sandbag, who is just as hypocritical and creepy as I had imagined she might be. Timely too, in view of the recent court judgment against Meta for negligently deploying algorithms designed to addict people to social media.

Interestingly, the way Zuckerberg and Sandberg are treated like gods who cannot be questioned, and whose every whim must be indulged, reminded me of the shock I experienced in my time working for an oil company in Houston. There really does seem to be a fascist streak in corporate American culture. And so many of the underlings seem to be such creeps, with no morals or independent thought.

I've read it only last month and they've made a movie already 🙂

5 hours ago, exchemist said:

Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This confirms all my darkest suspicions about Zuckerberg and his sidekick, the horrible Sheryl Sandbag, who is just as hypocritical and creepy as I had imagined she might be. Timely too, in view of the recent court judgment against Meta for negligently deploying algorithms designed to addict people to social media.

Sounds interesting but also a "broccoli" book. I don't know as much about Sandberg, but Zucks is definitely one of the Reptilians. They are drawn to corporate culture, as part of their plan to alter Earth's environment and government in preparing for the invasion fleet's arrival.

3 hours ago, Genady said:

I've read it only last month and they've made a movie already 🙂

Heh. Read it about 5 years ago when it was first published. The book had a light hearted tone, and I liked the highly creative approach to alternate forms of life. Combined a good first contact story with a save the world story. I did find the astrophages a little hard to believe, but I think it makes the point that the forms life can take are potentially way beyond the terrestrial variations we know.

Edited March 28Mar 28 by TheVat

Any reason I suddenly received a string of three downvotes in this thread on posts from February 2025? Pretty ordinary posts, so I can't quite fathom the objection. Or is this some peculiar reprisal for (jokingly) referring to Mark Zuckerberg as a Reptilian? Did anyone else get sudden DVs? @exchemist ? Or the bit about Poles having too many consonants -- that seemed also obviously a joke. And if these were stupid jokes why not then DV the offending post (s)? I welcome any feedback from either Poles or Reptilians, or possibly Reptilian Poles, though it's my understanding that Reptilians come from Zeta Reticulum and not Poland, generally. Or wherever Morena Baccarin came from in "V."

12 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Any reason I suddenly received a string of three downvotes in this thread on posts from February 2025? Pretty ordinary posts, so I can't quite fathom the objection. Or is this some peculiar reprisal for (jokingly) referring to Mark Zuckerberg as a Reptilian? Did anyone else get sudden DVs? @exchemist ? Or the bit about Poles having too many consonants -- that seemed also obviously a joke. And if these were stupid jokes why not then DV the offending post (s)? I welcome any feedback from either Poles or Reptilians, or possibly Reptilian Poles, though it's my understanding that Reptilians come from Zeta Reticulum and not Poland, generally. Or wherever Morena Baccarin came from in "V."

Weird. I don’t seem to have acquired any recently. Could it be Tiassa under a pseudonym, conducting a vendetta? 😆

Or maybe it’s Lizardberg exercising his uncanny internet power to destroy you.

On 3/28/2026 at 4:44 PM, exchemist said:

Lizardberg

Sounds like I'd better read your recommended "Careless People" if only to prepare fortifications against further incursions by the Reptilians or their Fifth Column. My thanks to whichever human(s) cancelled the DVs!

To the topic - a recent read in the genre of alien incursions was "Annihilation" by Jeff Vandermeer. Vastly better than the movie adaptation made a few years ago. Some books have psychological explorations which are really hard to translate into the language of cinema.

ETA: Wynn-Williams' title sounded so familiar to me. Then realized it was from the ending of The Great Gatsby.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Fitzgerald's words will never lose their freshness. While I'm here, let's have the rest of that sublime literary coda:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Sounds like I'd better read your recommended "Careless People" if only to prepare fortifications against further incursions by the Reptilians or their Fifth Column. My thanks to whichever human(s) cancelled the DVs!

To the topic - a recent read in the genre of alien incursions was "Annihilation" by Jeff Vandermeer. Vastly better than the movie adaptation made a few years ago. Some books have psychological explorations which are really hard to translate into the language of cinema.

ETA: Wynn-Williams' title sounded so familiar to me. Then realized it was from the ending of The Great Gatsby.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Fitzgerald's words will never lose their freshness. While I'm here, let's have the rest of that sublime literary coda:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Yes, Wynn-Williams chose that from Great Gatsby exactly because that was how she came to see Zuckerberg, Sandbag and the rest of them. They simply don't care what mess they create for other people, in their pursuit of more eyeballs. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is the way they decided to access the Chinese market, from which they were banned. They ended up offering the Chinese government access to all the data on Chinese users, including those in Hong Kong, making Facebook a tool of state surveillance while still pretending to users everything was secure. And there was the sleazy business of Sandberg, the big boss, trying to get Wynn-Williams into bed on a private jet [sic]. Apparently she had hired an entourage of suspiciously nubile young women to be her assistants (voile et vapeur, evidemment). "Me Too" or what?

Having read the book I have no doubt that the recent court case has gone the right way. I hope more follow. These people have no conscience at all. (They tried like hell to get the book suppressed of course and are still trying to pursue the author through the courts.)

Edited March 30Mar 30 by exchemist

Klara and the Sun, by Nobel prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro.

Liked this more than his other sci-fi themed novel, Never Let Me Go. (Not that it's not also masterful) As in his other work, he explores what it means to be human (using the first person perspective of an AI companion, an android who has feelings and even forms spiritual beliefs centered on the Sun), and how society can create and exploit a new underclass. But no summary really captures the emotional and philosophical depths of an Ishiguro novel, or his power to spring a revelation on the reader. As always, he showed me something about how we deal with constraints in our lives while still finding transcendent moments.

I don't know, maybe I'm just gobsmacked right now, but I want to say this is his best work. But of course I say that every effing time I finish one of his books.

The book was beautifully written, and one of the cases where you know exactly where the plot is going, and the theme is probably one of the oldest in scifi (essence of humanity). But it doesn't matter because it is just so well and seamlessly structured. I may have mentioned it somewhere, but even read it in small chunks due to time constraints, it was quite a treat. I also think that by only showing part of the dystopian system, the book invokes a more grounded feel of a future that is just off (a bit like the presence, actually). On top, many of the themes are extremely current (loneliness, search for spiritual answers, environmentalism etc.). Again, beautifully constructed without feeling constructed, which is just so hard to realize.

Normally, I prefer books where I cannot anticipate where it is going, it is a bit of a distraction for me from my usual very structured reading material. But again, this was really a treat.

49 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I also think that by only showing part of the dystopian system, the book invokes a more grounded feel of a future that is just off (a bit like the presence, actually).

I was also struck by this, where a dystopian structure is shown piecemeal (the way most people experience it) and sometimes only alluded to indirectly. Contrast the way eugenics emerges in "Klara" with how it is presented more forcefully in the film "Gattaca". (And kudos to Ishiguro for showing how genetic editing would be fraught with dangers, how it can't just turn on smartness without risking physical and social health) Also the passive way most people seem to accept the sentience of the Artificial Friends without asking about their autonomy and civil rights. Ishiguro is quite clever in showing us how easily people will accept a system of slavery if its presented as a universal good and the slaves aren't uppity. The "artist" Capaldi, though he hints at some notion of advancement for AFs, is also willing to see Klara's own personality as completely expendable in the service of becoming a Josie surrogate.

(And yes, Ishiguro doesn't mind telling us where the plot is going - early on, the mother asks Klara in the AF store if she can walk like Josie, but that in no way takes away emotional impact from what we learn later - the devil emerges from the details, and sometimes resides in a mother's twisted maternal feelings.)

Anyway, I'm glad you liked it.

I think Gattaca is a good contrast. I really didn't like the movie and in many ways it did the opposite of Klara and the Sun. It was not only on the nose, but also needed the Hollywood-esque exaggeration (e.g. to anchor discrimination on being an astronaut is plain weird). Klara is a masterpiece how understatement can carry tremendous emotional impact. Of course a book has more space to create layers than a movie, but I think by making all the elements rather quiet (including grief) rather than bombastic, it makes it just so much more impactful (especially the exploration of grief).

On 10/2/2026 at 3:23 PM, CharonY said:

Of course a book has more space to create layers than a movie, but I think by making all the elements rather quiet (including grief) rather than bombastic, it makes it just so much more impactful (especially the exploration of grief).

Yes! (seeing your reply belatedly)

Now reading a collection of illustrated stories (based on personal reminiscing) by Allie Brosh, "Hyperbole and a Half" . I had known nothing of her work. This chapter was my introduction (courtesy of Frau Vat), and very funny... http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

ETA: The "Richard" story I excerpt above is, in fact, from her later (second) graphic book, Solutions and Other Problems. But it's excerpted in the website for her aforementioned first book.

Edited Saturday at 12:59 AM3 days by TheVat
Link went dead, so I applied shock paddles