That collection has a bunch of great stories. Some I particularly like:
* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.
* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).
* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")
* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.
There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)
My non-fiction pile is very peculiar to me (maths, probability, gambling, Rust and Elixir books, a backlog of a load of recent Humble Bundle deals), but I have some solid fiction recommendations:
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is the sort of novel where you start to get sad as the weight of unread pages in your right starts to lighten. A novel about some friends who build some games (set in the 1990s and 2000s, with references to games of that era), it's really about friendship, social awkwardness and creativity.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke can't really take a review. When I first of it in Literary Review, the reviewer refused to disclose any plot for fear of providing spoilers, and I'm the same. I can just tell you, it's lovely. Her writing has got even better since she wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and it's a really, really solid novel.
Yesterday, my Dad messaged me about a current read I'll share here as a warning, and because his style is just hilarious:
I treated myself to a copy of "A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett: short stories unearthed after his death. Very disappointing. If I were you, I would wait until it is available at your local library and then you could scrawl cuss words inside it without damaging your personal copy.
It's a slow fantasy. Maybe. There are lots of different ways of reading a book. I err towards looking at the use of language, the turn of phrase, at least as much as I do the plot. Piranesi suits me, if you're more plot oriented, it might be quite a jarring story.
When Bluey is on a family camping trip, she meets a new friend, Jean Luc. Join them as they plant a tree, hunt a 'wild pig' and learn about the magic of friendship.
This episode broke my heart with its wholesomeness! I'm a grown ass adult and I watch Bluey unashamedly. I don't even have a kid companion to provide cover. It's such a layered show, with themes that resonate with adults as well. Cafe, where Bluey as a kid makes friends immediately with another kid, and Bandit and the other kid's dad were very cagey about how fast is too fast. Puppet subtext is as serious as any Ridley Scott Maker/Creature theme. Space is about revisiting traumatic events in one's past, and a gentle advise on how to deal with it. "I am Magic Claw. Magic Claw has no children. His days are free and easy." Hilarious and true.
I do have a kid, but I’ll sneak some Bluey even when they’re not around. It’s a great show with good lessons about life. Even good those of us who don’t quite fit the demographic.
About how we can realistically feed everyone on the planet long term, in a way that doesn't destroy nature, keeps soil healthy and more able to deal with climate change, and is also affordable.
Very good. Very well sourced, sceptical of romantic ideas that just don't scale.
Given that we currently use 60% of our agricultural land to feed livestock, that we then use to produce 12% of our calories (and 40% of the land for the other 88%), and that methods of agriculture that leave the ecology healthier have lower yields than current industrial methods, he takes as a given that we'll have to do without most of the livestock.
Steaks and bacon are some of the few things that make life worth living. I'd rather talk about population control for humans to achieve sustainability(maybe necessary in the end anyway) than deprive ourselves of the joy of a burger.
That sounds reasonable, as long as it's a choice. It's harsh and ineffecyive to ask people that aren't as attached to burgers to have their population controlled for them.
So people should have a choice, either go vegan, or they can enter the giant lottery where 90% gets population controlled by bullet or similar and the other 10% wins the right continue to consume burgers and other animal products the rest of their lives.
Or at least, that's what I understand when I read comments like yours.
In the meantime, you could try some plant based burgers. They're not a direct replacement but many of them are quite good on their own terms, and there is a huge variety.
People still smoke cigarettes despite decades of clear evidence that they will lead to a horrible death in many cases. Society has built so many disincentives to doing so, and yet they persist.
Animal products will continue to be consumed no matter how obvious it is that their production is morally repugnant and environmentally destructive.
I am sorry to say that I am one of those consumers despite knowing better.
My concern is that large corporations will slowly start pushing for taxes and restrictions putting limitations on natural proteins like meat so they can then sell their patented meat sources
Well, using land to produce feed to ship to CAFOs where animals experience almost nothing but suffering for their short lives is clearly reprehensible.
But George Monbiot quite famously adjusted his position[0] in response to - and since this is a thread about books - one of my favourite works on the subject, 'Meat, A Benign Extravagance' by Simon Fairlie (2010).
(My copy was signed by the author when I attended one of his scything weekends.)
Farmer here. This is false information - the land used to feed cattle is typically rangeland not capable of supporting other kinds of crops. Further, the cattle manure helps improve the soil.
I'm reading Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. It makes the case for more anarchy in science, that observations are shaped by the paradigm and that therefore new theories sometimes require respite from a lack of support in current evidence. It's a refreshing critique of Popper coming from within the analytic school. Like a Foucault light.
"Journey to the Edge of Reason, The Life of Kurt Gödel", by Stephen Budiansky.
Even though it contains an introduction to his proof of the Incompleteness Theorems, you won't learn all too much about logic or mathematics, but it sure paints an interesting picture of the people involved at the start of the 20th century.
"Silas Marner" by George Eliot. Has redefined humor for me.
"Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization" by Warren B. Powell. I'm still not entirely sure what to think of his claims about unifying many scientific disciplines, but it sure is packed with a lot of information and theory.
I bought a copy of Ben Hur in a second hand store for 3 dollars. The book was printed in 1887 and you can se it has been read by a lot of people and has been repaired at least once. I am hoping I can stick with it and finish it. Wish me luck.
Good luck! Please do pass long as soon as you finish it to people interested in reading it.
I have old books in my native language and some other languages inherited from my parents and grandparents and I have to find people to pass along as libraries will not take it because they don't have space or demand for it.
But when I find people who are interested in those topics, their eyes lit up when I pass along those books. I hope they cherish those books.
I love Ben Hur! The book is slightly longer than the movie, and has angles not in the movie at all. That's not to say either is lesser. I think both of them are quite representative of the story. If you want to discuss this, I'm on twitter with the same ID.
I thought you were going to tell us it has an erratum on page 116.
(A reference to the 1946 film version of "The Big Sleep", starring Bogie and Bacall. If you haven't seen it, it's an excellent movie. It even has a used bookstore.)
For tooling, I am currently reading Practical Vim by Drew Neil. Vim has been my primary editing tool for a couple of years now but I know that I am not close to maxing its capacity. I would like to supercharge my vim skill with more advanced macros and less keystrokes.
Fiction: I am currently reading the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I love the way the book plays with logic in a fictional style. The dialogues with the little demon, Wormwood, are super interesting. More like psycho analysis in fictional form. It reminds me about reading Brothers Karamazov where you find a lot about you in characters in the book.
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Ballard is science fiction in the sense he explores inner space instead of outer space.
Some are kind of eh, and ones that have really stuck out for me,
"Concentration City" - a giant infinitely expanding city ala Dark City or Blame!.
"Studio Five, The Stars" - poetry is written by machines and only eccentrics write their own. Think AI generation of art but in 1961.
"The Subliminal Man" - government uses subliminal messages to promote mindless consumerism - They Live but 1963.
"Billennium" - Earth is vastly overpopulated and any semblance of personal space or privacy is non-existent.
"The Garden of Time" - allegory of never ceasing approach of time no matter what you do to defend yourself from it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_o...
* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.
* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).
* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")
* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.
There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is the sort of novel where you start to get sad as the weight of unread pages in your right starts to lighten. A novel about some friends who build some games (set in the 1990s and 2000s, with references to games of that era), it's really about friendship, social awkwardness and creativity.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke can't really take a review. When I first of it in Literary Review, the reviewer refused to disclose any plot for fear of providing spoilers, and I'm the same. I can just tell you, it's lovely. Her writing has got even better since she wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and it's a really, really solid novel.
Yesterday, my Dad messaged me about a current read I'll share here as a warning, and because his style is just hilarious:
I treated myself to a copy of "A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett: short stories unearthed after his death. Very disappointing. If I were you, I would wait until it is available at your local library and then you could scrawl cuss words inside it without damaging your personal copy.
Solid advice that, I hope you'll agree.
Perhaps that is why he never published them?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/11/a-stroke-of-th...
When Bluey is on a family camping trip, she meets a new friend, Jean Luc. Join them as they plant a tree, hunt a 'wild pig' and learn about the magic of friendship.
Dead Comment
About how we can realistically feed everyone on the planet long term, in a way that doesn't destroy nature, keeps soil healthy and more able to deal with climate change, and is also affordable.
Very good. Very well sourced, sceptical of romantic ideas that just don't scale.
Given that we currently use 60% of our agricultural land to feed livestock, that we then use to produce 12% of our calories (and 40% of the land for the other 88%), and that methods of agriculture that leave the ecology healthier have lower yields than current industrial methods, he takes as a given that we'll have to do without most of the livestock.
So people should have a choice, either go vegan, or they can enter the giant lottery where 90% gets population controlled by bullet or similar and the other 10% wins the right continue to consume burgers and other animal products the rest of their lives.
Or at least, that's what I understand when I read comments like yours.
In the meantime, you could try some plant based burgers. They're not a direct replacement but many of them are quite good on their own terms, and there is a huge variety.
(90/10 split is a guess)
Animal products will continue to be consumed no matter how obvious it is that their production is morally repugnant and environmentally destructive.
I am sorry to say that I am one of those consumers despite knowing better.
But George Monbiot quite famously adjusted his position[0] in response to - and since this is a thread about books - one of my favourite works on the subject, 'Meat, A Benign Extravagance' by Simon Fairlie (2010).
(My copy was signed by the author when I attended one of his scything weekends.)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-p...
"Silas Marner" by George Eliot. Has redefined humor for me.
"Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization" by Warren B. Powell. I'm still not entirely sure what to think of his claims about unifying many scientific disciplines, but it sure is packed with a lot of information and theory.
I have old books in my native language and some other languages inherited from my parents and grandparents and I have to find people to pass along as libraries will not take it because they don't have space or demand for it.
But when I find people who are interested in those topics, their eyes lit up when I pass along those books. I hope they cherish those books.
(A reference to the 1946 film version of "The Big Sleep", starring Bogie and Bacall. If you haven't seen it, it's an excellent movie. It even has a used bookstore.)
Fiction: I am currently reading the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I love the way the book plays with logic in a fictional style. The dialogues with the little demon, Wormwood, are super interesting. More like psycho analysis in fictional form. It reminds me about reading Brothers Karamazov where you find a lot about you in characters in the book.