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ArisKatsaris comments on August 2015 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Fiction Books Thread
I have to recommend Phyl-Undhu from Nick Land (yes the guy from XenoSystems), yes is a little short, but if you like (or think you would like) Lovecraft then you should read it. I thought it was wonderfully written, and it get the cosmic horror/lovecraftian atmosphere very well.
'Mental traveler', a poem by William Blake.
I just found out that some comic books I read in Finnish in the 80s were originally published in English in 1976 in a magazine called Starstream. I re-read the comics, which are an anthology of comic adaptations of various golden age SF short stories. They also mostly stick to the source material, such as John Campbell's Who Goes There, which was also the basis for John Carpenter's The Thing. Generally it's quite a bit better than what you'd expect from "newsstand comic book from 1976", and a lot of the stories are quite weird, from the mix of outdated science and narrative conventions, source material from authors who sometimes were actually very good and the general mismatch with what you'd expect from the dated comic book format. Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Poul Anderson and Theodore Sturgeon are some of the more notable authors who get an adaption.
Read The Martian - not bad I guess, but a sort of celebration of terrible ethics.
The ethical dimension is lampshaded at a few points and it's pointed out that it's not quite that clearcut as 'we are wasting billions of dollars to riskily save one volunteer'; I felt he implies that the death might also kill or set back the space program, which makes the choice a bit different. I'm not sure he's entirely wrong: the public has really weird beliefs and attitudes (as this absurd 'Cecil the Lion' dustup has reminded us yet again) and it's entirely possible things might play out as depicted in Weir's novel. The last shuttle deaths did kill that program, after all.