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What in Hell’s name do I buy mrwITch for Christmas?

witch

By witch
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sonofsanta

sonofsanta

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What about new hard sci-fi

@sonofsanta ? :)

 

 

Recent hard SF books, hmm, let's see...

 

Top recommendation is absolutely Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky--phenomenal work of imagination, about a planet where spiders are accidentally uplifted instead of the primates, and so follows the development of spider civilization and its eventual encounter with the remnants of humanity. The sequel came out a year or so ago, too, Children of Ruin, which is equally brilliant, this time with octopuses/octopods/octopi.

 

Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series is an alternative timeline for the space race, where a meteor hits the Atlantic in the early 50s and so prompts an enormous space program to establish a colony on Mars. The Calculating Stars comes first, then The Fated Sky, and they were both my favourite books of 2018; the third book came out this year, The Relentless Moon, and I'm very much looking forward to it. If hubby enjoyed Hidden Figures as a film, this is absolutely in that aesthetic, and it's very engagingly written.

 

If hubby was a fan of Asimov's Foundation series, then Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter follows a similar structure of connected novelettes: it's set on a generation ship which is populated by clones in order to maintain the personality balance & skillset of the crew, and it follows successive generations as they deal with new problems & disasters, often ones caused by the solution the previous generation needed to enact. There's two follow up books, Noumenon Infinity and Noumenon Ultra, if he enjoys the first.

 

Oh! Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty is amazing, basically a closed room murder mystery in space. Six backup clones wake up to discover the murdered bodies they formerly inhabited and no memory of the events that led to all of them being killed and needing to revive in their clones. Utterly compelling stuff.

 

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz is a tech thriller rather than space-based, about robots and AI and freewill. Very entertaining and written with actual technical accuracy; I never got tired of robots exchanging polite protocol handshakes, amused me every time. If he's an IT nerd, it'll appeal.

 

There's the whole Expanse series of course, about 8 books in that, and the Amazon TV series to accompany it.

 

Ted Chiang had a new short story collection, Exhalations, out last year, and he remains unparallelled in modern spec-fic for his writing. Absolutely staggering stuff; from Wikipedia's summary, the collection is "nine stories exploring such issues as humankind's place in the universe, the nature of humanity, bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of AI". Heady stuff that makes you feel cleverer just for reading it. He's the guy what wrote the short story that was adapted into Arrival, if that film tickled his fancy (and that story is in the collection Time of Your Life from 2002, which is phenomenal, and still worth getting if he hasn't before).

 

I still haven't gotten round to reading Liu Cixin's trilogy that started with The Three Body Problem but it's famously hard-as-hard-SF-gets and Barack Obama recommended it, which is good enough for me. Similarly, Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series (starting with Ninefox Gambit) has a very good reputation, has won awards, and is hard military SF, but I haven't yet gotten round to it myself.

 

That's everything off the top of my head/in my Audible library that I think is relevant to the brief, but let me know if all this has already been read and I'll come up with some others!

Edited by sonofsanta
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Andrew_C

Andrew_C

Posted
Posted
Top recommendation is absolutely Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky--
Arachnophobes - give it a miss. I liked it, but it does meander a bit in the 3rd quarter.
The sequel came out a year or so ago, too,
Ooohhh.... Now that is interesting!
witch

witch

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The Mary Robinette stuff sounds good.

Children of time sounds too fantasy to me - he likes spaceships!

Noumenon sounds worth a look too

as well as Six Wakes and Autonomous

 

He didnt get on with Expanse - I am not sure why. We watched quite a few episodes but it just didnt click

 

He doesnt like short stories (sorry, I love them!)

 

Thanks very much though - gives me some ideas :)

sonofsanta

sonofsanta

Posted
Posted
Children of time sounds too fantasy to me - he likes spaceships!

 

There are space ships (and SPIDERS) Have I said that before?

 

 

Yeah, Children of Time is very science-fiction--it's an uplift virus designed to rapidly drive evolution in an attempt to terraform a planet, but the primates they dropped on the surface all die out early so the virus latches onto the spiders instead. It's very logical in the way it develops spider society from there, and thinks about how they'd communicate, how they'd interpret the orbiting space station (that's still transmitting, and houses a human-turned-AI-gone-mad) in religious terms, and how they then interact with the remnants of humanity that arrive looking for a habitable planet. It won the Arthur C Clarke award, so it's definitely got SF credentials :)

 

 

Glad to be of service in selling my friends' and peers books, though. Good luck!

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witch

witch

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He has a telescope, thanks - didnt mention that, did I? That was the unexpected but loved present a few years ago!

 

Maybe I wil look at the spider epic. I personally love spiders. I don't think mrwITch has any feelings one way or the other about them :)

mikeprice

mikeprice

Posted
Posted
He has a telescope, thanks - didnt mention that, did I? That was the unexpected but loved present a few years ago!

 

Maybe I wil look at the spider epic. I personally love spiders. I don't think mrwITch has any feelings one way or the other about them :)

 

Are there any attachments available for the telescope?

something that follows a star over a few hours to allow photographs - or something??

witch

witch

Posted
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Posted (edited)
Are there any attachments available for the telescope?

something that follows a star over a few hours to allow photographs - or something??

 

Yes, he has them

 

We've done all the films that we want to do thanks

 

As for the chopsticks - very cool - but he doesnt eat anything you could eat with such things. Strictly meat and potatoes sort of guy.

 

I'm making him sound really odd - he really isnt, he just isnt into "stuff".

 

We love to travel and new experiences like that interest him but he doesnt want or need to try new foods as he likes what he eats and doesnt get bored with the same thing over and over again!

Edited by witch
Ditto

Ditto

Posted
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After my earlier post about not wanting anything, I could quite fancy one of those [emoji854]

This has sparked my interest too. I have a box of slides (I think 35mm) from my mum that go back to my grandfathers photography days. I was going to run them through the scanner one day, but it's not moved in years! I've looked at a Plustek 8200I SE which is treble the price, but I'm thinking buy this for Xmas (with some siblings!) and provide some guidance on using. Sort of like 'empowering' the end user! I also have some negatives, 126 etc., that it makes sense to digitise. So, although not helping Mr Witch, I appreciate the idea coming up.

Ditto

Ditto

Posted
Posted
I'm begin to wonder with all the things Mr Witch has already, perhaps you just need to buy him a dedicated insurance policy to cover it all :D
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6Foot2

6Foot2

Posted
Posted

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