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PSA: The excellent #murderbot series by Martha Wells is available as a Humble Bundle right now, all 7 books in the series + 7 short stories and other novels. DRM-free epub files. Highly recommended.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books

"Despite being a powerful and lethal security unit, Murderbot is an extreme introvert. Its primary goal is to be left alone so it can spend its time watching hours of its favorite soap operas and other media. It's highly cynical, sarcastic, and finds human interaction to be awkward and tedious. However, it also finds itself unexpectedly forming bonds with the humans it's supposed to protect, which leads to a lot of internal conflict and reluctant heroism."

#SciFi #bookstodon #books

Don't need it anymore at the moment. Will probably come back to it later next year.

@tofuwabohu@wyrms.de FWIW, I thought the tone and style was one of the best things about it. Especially with language and its power being one of the most important themes of the book along with the technology around bronze-age level, I appreciated how the language of the book carried the story so well while also conveying both the foreign and the familiar. Also, it occurs to me as I unintentionally used "language and its power" above that she seems to have been drawing on the Daodejing (sometimes translated as "The Classic of the Way and its Power") for language as well as for narrative structure & worldbuilding.

More than lives up to the hype. If anything, I'm disappointed I didn't read it when I was younger; I might have learned some valuable lessons.

Hands down the most striking thing about Lord of Light is how well Zelazny captured the tone of the source material and translated it into a form that works well within the context of a novel of speculative fiction. This is the first and only work of Zelazny's I have read thus far, so I might just be impressed by what qualifies for his usual style, but it feels much too intentional to me for it not to have been done on purpose. Despite the excellent voice and tonal execution which permeate the book, I had the sense that there was more of an effort to bend the source material to the story Zelazny wanted to tell rather than the story which the combination of the source material and the other ideas in the book might have been naturally most suited to tell. Maybe it's not a masterpiece, but it's close enough to that that it probably influenced a lot of similar works which came after it. Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos come to mind as favorable candidates.

Putting whatever timeless merits the book may or may not have aside, it operates on many levels and does a lot really well. The most valuable to me was how the gods and Sam occupied and moved through the space between the mundane mortal, the legendary, and the divine. The drama and political intrigue were interesting, and so was the exploration of the ramifications of the particular kind of #reincarnation which featured in the story. There were also some interesting bits about how #legends develop over time which tied nicely into the other themes of the book.

The last thing I want to mention is that I had this recommended to me as a #Buddhist novel, which I think is a bit of an oversimplification; it contains some Buddhist ideas, but I think the underlying message is more the common science fiction refrain of scientific progress than it is about liberation. That said, I thought the presentation of the concepts of #impermanence and especially of #selflessness were really well done.

#anicca #anitya #anatta #anatman

#BodhiCollege just released their #2025 #RecommendedSummerReading

There are always a lot of good recommendations and they're not on the #fediverse AFAIK, so here's the link: https://bodhi-college.org/recommended-summer-reading-from-the-faculty-2025/

#Buddhism #Buddhist #Bodhi #reading #summerreading

I've been thinking about this one quite a bit lately. I'm wondering:

To what extent is it a question of economic or social #privilege to be able to make this choice at all? An example from my own life: as the pressures of #inflation continue, it feels like less of a choice to have this-or-that store app with #coupons and #discounts and whatnot on my phone. Even if I minimize the disturbance as much as possible by turning off #notifications, I'm still giving up a little sliver of my available attention in exchange for a (questionable?) economic benefit.

Also, for someone who is saddled with a lot of responsibilities or #mentalload or both, especially when time is low and a lot of planning and coordination is required, how realistic is it that one could make the shift away from depending so much on the phone?

Or looking at it another way, how much is this a realistic solution and how much is it a #romantic wouldn't-that-be-nice kind of idea? And even if it is realistic, my personal experience has shown that trying to make any change on my own is difficult at best; I wonder if it's helpful to put so much responsibility on each individual person. Pandora's box is open. What are we going to do about it now?

#economicPrivilege #socialPrivilege #digitalMinimalism

Within the introduction and roughly half of the first chapter, it's already among the most welcoming-feeling presentations of #interdependence / #interbeing / #emptiness (here presented as #belonging with good reason) I've ever come across. Also one of the better self-narrations I've heard in a while. Looking forward to how the rest of the book develops

#Buddhism

@ricci@discuss.systems I think Dennis E. Taylor's #Bobiverse series might be worth a mention here for being both (relatively hard) #SF along with making really light reading because of the abundance of references to and gags involving other SF works. Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary might also tick your boxes and it has great production value. It also won an Audie if that means anything to you. Incidentally, Ray Porter is the narrator in all of the above cases.

@tofuwabohu@wyrms.de I haven't heard anything, but Martha Wells has a newsletter you could sign up for on her website, so maybe that's something. Not sure how much she's involved with the TV show, but historically this has been something which tends to delay progress on various series. From a plot standpoint, I think that this would be a nice place to end things, but I also think that there is plenty of space left for further plot & character development. I for one would definitely like to see how the things set up in the end of this one play out.