Recently New Scientist had an article about scientists who had managed to transport ions across a room. They didn’t put it in a box and walk it over. No. They actually transported it. As in: Poof, it’s there! Pretty incredible if you ask me. Maybe we’ll do two ions this time. And then a goldfish!
Who knows!
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Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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2 Responses
Ah, sorry for the delayed reply.
I can’t go past the meme of Must Read Sci-fi and Fantasy Books (which I printed off, I’m keeping an eye out for ’em), so I’ll try and answer your questions best to my memory.
I haven’t read much science fiction, and the ones I have read are the classics (H.G.Wells and Jules Verne). So I’m afraid I’m a bit limited, but I do know what I might enjoy.
What sort of sci-fi do I like? I like futuristic and other worlds, adventure and alien-ish, robots, anything underwater, and time travel. And if steampunk counts, then that too. Sci-fi/horror is always great.
I don’t like Star Trek, Star Wars, or Stargate, but Doctor Who is good, though I haven’t read any of the books I’ve seen the show.
I hope you can help.
— Kayla
Well, let’s see. If you like adventure and aliens and the like, you can try Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and others in that period of time (for the classics, anyway).
For newer stuff, you might enjoy Tobias S. Buckell’s work. You should start with Crystal Rain, although that novel is more like a fantasy with a science fiction twist than his later novels, but since it is the first in a story arc (each book being individual), it’s useful to start there. Or you can skip straight to Ragamuffin or Sly Mongoose. I don’t recommend skipping, but it’s up to you. The latter two are more space-adventure.
Other authors you might want to try include: John Scalzi (try Old Man’s War), Greg Bear (try Eon), Elizabeth Bear (Carnival or Dust are good starters), John Varley (try some of the Podkayne stuff), or dig up some Ben Bova.
That should be a good start. Just sort of look through those authors and find ones that sound like they fit into what you like. Most of those authors have jumped around the science fiction genre and are likely to have something that sounds interesting to you.
Hope this helps :).