The current state of the world certainly makes the human politics (and effects on scientific inquiry) seem extremely relevant! Kiln biology and what usually gets explored in transhumanism make an interesting dialog, for sure.

The current state of the world certainly makes the human politics (and effects on scientific inquiry) seem extremely relevant!

Eerily and frighteningly so.

I’m now in two book groups, one in NC and one in MI. For the MI one we read “When Women Became Dragons,” and for the NC one we read The Fourth Wing, about people who ride dragons. So there’s a bit of a theme for February. I liked the latter better. The former seemed to me to use a bit of fantasy to tell a non-fantastical story of women’s repression in mid-20th century US. It had pacing problems and the symbolism was rather heavy handed, but the protagonist was interesting.

The latter is much more of a classic fantasy, complete with a map of The Continent in the front. It had some YA tropes and vibes, but I enjoyed the characters, their relationships, and the overall writing better.

It was kinda fun to compare and contrast them, though.

I have read Fourth Wing but not the sequels. It was entertaining but not super more so than other similar books I've read, so I don't quite get why it's getting SOOO much love? But whatever.

I spent part of the afternoon downloading about 5 years worth of books from my amazon account--I didn't bother with most of the trashy romances I'll never re-read, and the last couple years I've bought relatively little because I read more from Kindle Unlimited and the library, but it was still a lot of books. And apparently I hadn't done it in 5 years. And then I made sure Calibre was up to date and de-DRMd them all. Had a random bunch that wouldn't, but when I added my kindle serial number to the de-DRM plugin, it worked. Yay! It's stupid, because it's not even like I'm doing anything other than making it easier to load these onto my iPad or future reading devices if I want? (yes, I can read in the kindle app on my iPad but sometimes I want to just download a series and not see all the other many books, so I side load from Calibre and read from iBooks). I'm not out here pirating my book hoard. The most I've done is let my sister read some of them. I don't even know how to pirate books these days! (Let's not talk about years ago, what I may have known or done). But it annoys me and makes me WANT to give copies of more of these books to friends. Hrmph. I feel curmudgeonly, but it did help distract me from the burning of our republic!

Maybe the character will show up in one of the other novels.

That would be interesting! I wouldn’t mind more history. I’m also hoping there’s more about the ring, assuming it’s return will have repercussions

A bunch of Terry Pratchett ebooks are on sale at Amazon: [link]

I was listening to Island of the Sequined Love Nun (I am lackadaisically working my way through Christopher Moore's oeuvre in between other things as I feel like it. I do like his stuff but haven't wanted to really wallow in it) on the way to work this morning and came to a scene where a jet narrowly avoids hitting a helicopter and it just . . . felt very weird? I don't know that I have a word for that.

I just saw where Asimov's and F&SF have a new owner (along with Analog but I haven't read that one in a long time). I hope that's good news, especially for F&SF where the owner seems to have been the source of quite a bit of the rocky road they've been on. That's two thirds of my magazine subscriptions, I did not realize I had all my eggs in so few baskets.

I have finished the Dungeon Crawler Carl books they are awesome..

I just finished The Hitman's Guide to Making Friends and Finding Love. Which is a zany romp about a hitman and a PI.

The Hitman's Guide to Making Friends and Finding Love.

Ha, this series was bonkers. I don't think I read all 7 (IIRC the writing quality degraded and they started to get repetitive) but I do remember liking the first one.