The Kiwifarms Unofficial Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club

I love when scifi explores the future of beauty and how being beautiful or ugly could be a deliberate social statement instead of just luck of the genetic roll.
There was a story by Ted Chiang in the Arrival collection about a brain implant that removes the concept of beautiful people. It was really well done, it was about a university trial with this implant, and the central idea was that beauty was the most inbuilt human prejudice which is absolutely true and the story discusses it very well.
 
Been telling my sci-fi loving grandfather about this book club. I told him we chose Neuromancer this month instead of Starship Troopers. He's all but called you guys queers; in his words:
"Troopers is more of a story about the awakening of citizen and an adult. Way too heavy duty for the Neuromancer crowd. Heinlein was an officer in the Navy."
I'm still rooting for Starship Troopers and if it isn't this month it should be next month.

Also it's kind of sad nobody has mentioned Cordwainer Smith.
According to a little research, William Gibson later felt he should have dialed back on the prose a bit.
I have to disagree, I like interesting descriptions and details in my stories. The way he's describing walking through the city and all the wild shit there is just a joy to read.
It has one of the greatest opening sentences of any novel.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
 
Ostatnio edytowane:
and the central idea was that beauty was the most inbuilt human prejudice which is absolutely true and the story discusses it very well.
I think I read that one, did it have some of the people decide to keep it and others have it removed? And one of the plotlines was about a girl and a guy dating but it fell apart after they got the implants? The nuance and varied reactions of the characters were great.

@AnOminous (won't let me quote you). It's pure luck that the opening line has remained coherent despite the color of dead channels changing over generations, but it's still absolute kino. Honestly the changing interpretations (grey and cloudy? piercing blue? midnight black?) make it more beautiful, even though he couldn't have predicted that at the time of writing.
 
Ostatnio edytowane:
I think I read that one, did it have some of the people decide to keep it and others have it removed? And one of the plotlines was about a girl and a guy dating but it fell apart after they got the implants? The nuance and varied reactions of the characters were great.
That’s the one.
I actually really love the shorts in that collection, they’re all done so well and my personal favorites are Understand and Hell Is The Absence of God. All of the stories were very unique in approach, topic, and philosophy.
I’d highly recommend that collection.
 
The scariest book I've read was Permutation City by Greg Egan, it's got to do with virtual reality. One guy locks himself in an infinite loop after getting dumped by his gf, one gets away with murder and creates a virtual copy of himself to get tortured for enernity in his stead (the narration is from the copy's point of view), and one straight up disembowels himself because "you don't need a machine to go to VR, the universe is big so you will continue to exist somewhere".
I despised one facet of Egan's bibliography, but I will admit that one facet I despised was very small, a short story, and this sounds worth exploring.

Really, any suitably skeptical media exploring mind uploading, quantum immortality, continuity of personal identity (or the illusion thereof), anything of that sort brings forth a visceral reaction in me that I perceive as a more refined analogue of body horror: it's one thing to see the control over the body removed and its form viscerally unveiled as a mere contingency, but to have that done to the mind, what my implicitly dualist cultural background struggles to let me perceive as anything other than separate from the flesh, what from the subjective inside seems like a cohesive, continuous experiential whole? Even more awful.

I'm particularly interested and appalled by many-worlds interpretations that would see myself branching across every possible permutation of the cosmos. Free will annihilated not through determinism but sheer saturation.

To bring this back around to the book at hand, while Neuromancer doesn't have the reputation of covering these issues, I at least hope it explores bodily disassociation. The first chapter has had Case lament being trapped in his flesh, but what I'm really looking forward to is how Gibson describes the experience of "leaving" it.
 
I think I got a bunk OCR epub of Nueromancer. Some words are scanned in wrong, and entire conversations will occur within one paragraph. Gonna look for a new one.

Here are my Soy Reddit Nintendo Switch offerings for the October Novels

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World War Z, by Max Brooks
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

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Perfume, by Patrick Süskind
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

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Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons
THE PAST... Caught behind the lines of Hitler’s Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp. Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face to face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazi’s themselves...
THE PRESENT... Compelled by the encounter to survive at all costs, so begins a journey that for Saul will span decades and cross continents, plunging into the darkest corners of 20th century history to reveal a secret society of beings who may often exist behind the world's most horrible and violent events. Killing from a distance, and by darkly manipulative proxy, they are people with the psychic ability to 'use' humans: read their minds, subjugate them to their wills, experience through their senses, feed off their emotions, force them to acts of unspeakable aggression. Each year, three of the most powerful of this hidden order meet to discuss their ongoing campaign of induced bloodshed and deliberate destruction. But this reunion, something will go terribly wrong. Saul’s quest is about to reach its elusive object, drawing hunter and hunted alike into a struggle that will plumb the depths of mankind’s attraction to violence, and determine the future of the world itself..

Bonus Reddit Review of Carrion Comfort:
"Like I said I'm about 400 pages into Carrion Comfort and , while I am thoroughly enjoying the plot, Man! does this guy seem to have it in for Black people!"

I've read World War Z and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven't read Perfume or Carrion Comfort, although they've both been recommended to me by people whose taste I trust.
 
It's so funny imagining if "sarariman" was the slang that caught on instead of corpos in cyberpunk slang.

lmao, I wanted to put a link to Gibson saying sarariman in the audiobook, but they cut out the scene. I thought it was a great little scene that gave lots of flavour to the setting and some interesting exposition on the black-market clinics. It's a shame it was cut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DFSvbkQaD0&t=880s is where the scene should be

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It's so funny imagining if "sarariman" was the slang that caught on instead of corpos in cyberpunk slang.
Out of curiosity, did that and a lot of the other Japanese flavor not catch on in cyberpunk circles because their economy utterly tanked in the 90s (a few years after the Sprawl Trilogy came out)? I vaguely remember this reputation of "Japan's growth is insane, they're the forerunners of technology and are going to be massively influential on the world stage in the future" back in the day that isn't really around anymore. Like they're still strongly associated with tech and gadgets but no one writes them as "big players" in near-future sci fi settings anymore; that role's been replaced by China.
 
Been a few years since I did a read through, personally love the writing style although not everyone does.
Predicting that digital transactions would almost entirely replace physical cash is pretty damn good for the mid-80's.
 
I'm really enjoying this so far. Great prose all throughout - a fine balance of illustrative descriptors that isn't laid on too thick but manages to tell you just enough, just right. I'm quite fond of his characterization of Ratz.
 
Been a few years since I did a read through, personally love the writing style although not everyone does.
Predicting that digital transactions would almost entirely replace physical cash is pretty damn good for the mid-80's.
Given the ongoing fatwa against the enemy of all humanity, payment processors, that part about cash being illegal and money only being digital was a dang good prediction for the future Amazon dystopia.
 
Like they're still strongly associated with tech and gadgets but no one writes them as "big players" in near-future sci fi settings anymore; that role's been replaced by China.
No matter what pessimistic dystopian future you imagine, what actually happens will be even worse. It's not sleek cyberpunk shiny corporate shit, it's shitty chinky buildings made out of garbage collapsing months after they're built.
 
Out of curiosity, did that and a lot of the other Japanese flavor not catch on in cyberpunk circles because their economy utterly tanked in the 90s (a few years after the Sprawl Trilogy came out)? I vaguely remember this reputation of "Japan's growth is insane, they're the forerunners of technology and are going to be massively influential on the world stage in the future" back in the day that isn't really around anymore. Like they're still strongly associated with tech and gadgets but no one writes them as "big players" in near-future sci fi settings anymore; that role's been replaced by China.
No, I think the Japanese flavor runs pretty deep through cyberpunk as a genre. Arasaka is a throwback "Japanese company took over the world" type of corp and one of the biggest antagonist megacorps in the Mike Pondsmith Cyberpunk world. There's a feudal themed Japanese megacorp in Shadowrun, and there's tons of the neon and noodle aesthetic from Neuromancer and Bladerunner too. Bladerunner is unbelievably kino, and steeped in that neo Japanese neon and noodle aesthetic, so cyberpunk visuals have been borrowing from Bladerunner for years. I just think slang that requires you do do a bad Japanese accent is too funny to live.

No matter what pessimistic dystopian future you imagine, what actually happens will be even worse. It's not sleek cyberpunk shiny corporate shit, it's shitty chinky buildings made out of garbage collapsing months after they're built.
This is so depressingly true. If some cyberpunk visionary had written a plot that predicted the 2008 financial collapse, bankers would be burying the story, killing journalists, and lobotomizing people on the inside who knew too much. In real life when companies have evil plots some lawyer is just like "here's the list of loopholes we used, so everything's kosher," and that's pretty much the end of it. Or maybe they get some tiny fine.
 
It's not sleek cyberpunk shiny corporate shit, it's shitty chinky buildings made out of garbage collapsing months after they're built.
Or even if you go the corporate route, it'll be Neal Stephenson's 15 minute long memo on office toilet paper regulations, not stylish besuited sararimen.

I wanna see more dystopian authors use Korea for their inspiration. The psychotic beauty standards and dysfunctional gender relations could really lend itself to some neat scifi body horror.
 
Just finished chapter one

Most of the chapter is Case being a paranoid schitzo about Wage coming to kill him. He get's told by his drug addict GF that wage want's to kill him, and he believes it. After a few scenes where he buys a cobra and runs from goons, hurts his leg, rents a gun, goes back to his coffin, then is confronted by Wage at the bar, he learns that Wage WASN'T trying to kill him, he just wanted his money (case squares his debt by giving him a flask that he couldn't sell) and figures his druggy ex GF set him up to steal his pocket computer. So everything that happened in this chapter was him being mislead about being in trouble? That's what I get form it anyway.
 
The funniest thing about Neuromancer is they act like Japan will be the future of humanity. When Japan's only contribution to humanity is anime and video games. Literally media for man children and troons to waste their lives on. The dystopian cyberpunk genre thought Japan would be the big dog but it's the autistic play pen for retards and sex pests.
 
I'm loving this so far. Just finished Part One and I'm already liking Case. I hate when authors try and turn the protagonist into some stubborn know-it-all that you can't empathise with, but Case has some weird likeability to him. He's clearly broken and flawed but I'm already rooting for him regardless.

No matter what pessimistic dystopian future you imagine, what actually happens will be even worse. It's not sleek cyberpunk shiny corporate shit, it's shitty chinky buildings made out of garbage collapsing months after they're built.
I love that pessimistic side of of cyberpunk genre. Some bustling, neon-covered nightlife in the heart of a city but if you dig deep enough you find run-down cracks and crevices that have you realise that all the bravado is simply just papering over the cracks. Everyone's seemingly aware of how dangerous it is regardless of how inviting it looks.

I can't find the exact quote but Gibson mentions it in Chapter 1 how Night City is less about the inhabitants and more about it's own unsupervised technology playground. If you can't handle it then you'll drown in it.
 
I think I got a bunk OCR epub of Nueromancer. Some words are scanned in wrong, and entire conversations will occur within one paragraph. Gonna look for a new one.
Look for one of my posts earlier in the thread, it has a link to all the books from the poll. I'm reading the Neuromancer Epub in it, and it doesn't have the issues you mention, so go for it.

Maybe it could be put in the OP, I'll try to update it with the month's books as we move forward, so it would be good to have it somewhere easy to find for everyone.

Just finished chapter one

Most of the chapter is Case being a paranoid schitzo about Wage coming to kill him. He get's told by his drug addict GF that wage want's to kill him, and he believes it. After a few scenes where he buys a cobra and runs from goons, hurts his leg, rents a gun, goes back to his coffin, then is confronted by Wage at the bar, he learns that Wage WASN'T trying to kill him, he just wanted his money (case squares his debt by giving him a flask that he couldn't sell) and figures his druggy ex GF set him up to steal his pocket computer. So everything that happened in this chapter was him being mislead about being in trouble? That's what I get form it anyway.
Yes, mostly. The only caveat is he IS being chased, just not by Wage's people, and the person chasing him is not looking to kill him either. All in all the chapter uses Case's paranoid freakout to give us a little tour and a crash course of this world and how it works, as well as Case's background and characterization, which I thought was a clever way to go about it.

I just finished Chapter 2, and I may post more thoughts about it later but what jumps out to me right now is how good the confusion prose is. What I mean is, there's scenes where Case is overwhelmed or confused or impaired in some way, the prose does a great job of communicating it. For example, when Case undergoes treatment for his neurological injuries, the scene flows seamlessly from the operating table to him recuperating and being looked after in his "coffin" by Molly, because that's how it felt to him. Or the scene they go to see a fight at a coliseum of sorts, he finds his ex-GF dead, he's attacked by one of the killers, and saved by Molly; he's feeling sick the whole time (from his own paranoia, again) and the holograms of the fight distract him and confuse him (particularly cool paralel is the hologram depicting someone's throat getting cut as the killer is trying to do the same to Case). It's all a blur to him, he's grasping at objects to focus on, and you feel the disorientation. At least I did.

Anyway liking it so far.
 
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