Interesting Links for 04-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Don't like the way some sites fill up your Google searches? Here's a browser addon that fixes that.

(tags:browser search )

2. Online security and privacy tune-up suggestions for 2024!

(tags:security advice )

3. One Life (2023) and thoughts on asylum

(tags:asylum immigration history )

4. Italy divided over new pineapple pizza

(tags:pizza fruit )

5. Which Hugo Winners Have You Read: the poll! (I've read 33)

(tags:hugo awards poll )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

5. More than I thought, but only 12. None more recent than The City and the City. Dystopia and climate disaster don't appeal - and those seem sometimes like the only themes in SF in recent years :-(

[poshmerchant]

None of the Nebula winners I've read since City and the City are about climate change.

2021's Network Effect by Martha Wells is a fun action-packed space opera

2019's Calculating Stars is an alternate history space program. No climate change unless you consider asteroid impacts climate change

2015's The Three Body Program was bad, but nothing to do with climate change

2014's Ancillary Justice is a far future space opera. The sequels tends towards far future cozy mystery

2013's Redshirts is a fun Star Trek pastiche

2010's co-winner The Windup Girl is a climate change book, I suppose

[channelpenguin]

Interesting. Clearly I have the wrong impression!

Sigh. The older I get, the more I enjoy (in both books and films), the world-building (usually the start) but find the trials and crises and whathaveyou that heroes go through either boring or unpleasant - maybe reminds me too much of some of the much more minor "adventures" and accidents have had (I did a lot of offshore sailing, and have been seriously injured in a motorbike crash, for example). I like exploration type of adventure, puzzle or problem solving without "disaster movie" trimmings. I guess hard to find even in factual writing!

[poshmerchant]

Have you tried Andy Weir's books? The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary are all puzzle and problem solving, though some of the stakes are life and death

I think you'd enjoy The Spare Man, which is a space cruise liner murder mystery from Mary Robinette Koval. She won the 2019 prize for Calculating Stars, but I think The Spare Man is a much lighter read

Another fun sci-fi mystery with relatively low stakes is Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. High concept, low stakes, fun

[andrewducker]

Long Way to a Small Angry Planet might work too

[channelpenguin]

Thank you very kindly for the ideas!