There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

Kai is a powerful demon who awakens outside of his human body to find he's been trapped unconscious in a tomb for over a year. His long-time friends are also missing. He has to figure out who has done this, and why. The story alternates between this “present" timeline, and a "past” timeline that starts with him as a young demon in his newly-gifted human body. Wells has a real knack for creating worlds with interesting rules (far from the cookie cutter tropes of some fantasy), and then exploring the boundaries of those rules. I enjoyed it, but also felt like there was an odd detachment to the story - like there wasn't a lot of emotional attachment to the characters. As an aside, Wells has a penchant for making subtle or not-so-subtle commentary on our society and the prejudices in it. As examples in this one, demons are referred to by the gender of their demon selves, not the gender of the body they're in. Some societies have gender neutral clothing, but where it's gendered it's the men who wear skirts and women who wear pants. One culture is referred to as confusing because they stick to two genders.

Just found out about this artist, goes by Dirty Iron online. Amazing grayscale work.

Book four of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Carl, Donut, and Katia get to the next level, get into more trouble, get additional skills and levels, and figure more things out. This level has the crawlers divided up into separate domes with different circular quadrants. Also, there's getting to be a little more about the underlying factions and politics of the universe as the serious progresses. As before, if you liked the prior books, you'll probably like this one.

Zula has taken a job at a company responsible for a globally popular video game, founded by her billionaire uncle. Her boyfriend Peter has entered into an illegal transaction with someone he doesn't realize is connected to the Russian Mafia. Everything goes south, and Zula and Peter are abducted. What follows is a book with a giant scope. It's an international suspense thriller that takes a multitude of interesting main characters to the limits of their capabilities. Stephenson manages to linger on lots of small technical details in a way that's interesting, and while still making a real page-turner with characters we care about for over 1000 pages.

The shortest sci-fi story ever.

So, it's a very optimistic story. If some of you are utterly despaired, well of course it certainly won't fix the problem(s), but it could be food for thought.

In general, I'd be curious to know what did you think of this story (its very long tho compared to my usual posts, so theyre might not be a lot of readers)

Thinking of adding a comment section in the future

I'm non dénominationel Christian and id be interested by any kind of christianity inspired works, be they catholic or protestant or whatever.

Same for all religions: buddhism, islam, anything religious.

If not religious but spiritual and exceptionnal like PKD's gnosticism, Im also curious. Not only for the gnosticism, but the whole doubting if some things experienced during psychosis are not all batshit-land, so I've also put Jung in my to read list, but let's keep it sci-fi.

Maggie is an 83-year-old woman living alone while her husband is in a memory care facility with Alzheimer's. She's visited by a man who tells her that it's not a disease - her husband's memories are being erased intentionally because of something he discovered, and she needs to go inside his memories to find out what it was and to save him. There's quite a bit packed into this book. It's a thriller, a puzzle book, and especially it's a love story. There's one element of the book that seems more like mysticism than SF, but it's hard to say more - really about any aspect of the book - without spoilers. I enjoyed it and it kept me turning pages into the night.

Based on a request from a comment deep in another thread I have a quick review of the novel Katabasis by R.F Kuang

The novel in brief (without any spoilers) is about two magicians, doctoral candidates, who must venture into hell to save their thesis advisor in order to receive letters of recommendation. Its a deep look into academia and our concepts of hell and the underworld.

Overall I would recommend the book especially if you enjoy fantasy, or deep world building. Like other R.F Kuang novels is it well researched, full of real world references and root in her own experiences. In this book the experiences is academia especially the cut throat elite university of a PhD program. The book is about a journey to hell deep with references toward underworld deities and stories from around the world that add a depth and complexity to a hero’s journey. The trip to the underworld is a method to both explore the deep world building including an unique magic system as well as the protagonist personal journey of discovery. The novel is about two similar characters who are both magician going through a personal journey to rescue their advisor for their own personal reasons. Overall, its fascinating, well researched and definitely unique. Overall I would recommend it, especially if you enjoy Babel.

Like some of her other novels it can get long but in this case the multiple layers of hell do provide a direction as well a structure about its length. Like most of her other novels there are multiple themes and ideas that are explored which can seem meandering but I quite enjoyed all the ideas.

Book three of the Palleseen Sway series. Many of the main characters of the prior book figure into this one, but they're less of the focus. It takes place in the aftermath of the prior book’s war, but in Usmiat, a costal city kingdom ruled by a blind king, but with some Pal presence in the city. Most of the focus is on the woman who is the highest ranking Pal, and on the king's heir. This one seemed to take longer to get going, but as it went along the momentum kept building. Tchaikovsky does a good job creating rich and diverse cultures as they clash or align. Good.

I read a lot of both SF and fantasy. Most communities I've dealt with have commingled the genres, in part because the line between them can be blurry. Is this community supposed to be strictly SF, or are discussions of fantasy also okay?

I was going to post my mini review of Days of Shattered Faith, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, but it's clearly fantasy (though Tchaikovsky writes quite a lot of SF), so I thought I should ask.

Edit: it seems like I've had pretty good response to the question, and the vast majority would prefer to be more inclusive rather than draw a line. I'll go ahead and continue posting both, though note that so far a moderator hasn't weighed I in, and that could change things.

Book three of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The team is on a level consisting of trains and stations. I was almost right that I could reuse “Carl and Donut get to the next level, get into more trouble, get additional skills and levels, and figure more things out” except that I have to add Katia. It's a good hearted series. As before, if you liked the prior books, you'll probably like this one

NERVA has about 250 kN of thrust at 841 seconds of specific impulse.
Merlin 1D has about 1000 kN of thrust at 311 seconds of specific impulse.
That suggests NTRs have around 4x less thrust, but around 2.7z more efficiency than chemical rockets. At a large enough scale craft, the weight of the engine could be considered irrelevant. But for smaller crafts, the Merlin has a thrust to weight ratio of 184:1, whereas NTRs only ever achieved 7:1 (they hoped to get up to around 35:1 eventually).

I imagine the thrust to weight could be substantially improved by making lightweight reactors, but I’m wondering if anybody knows anything about concepts for higher thrust NTRs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Merlin

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/41960577

After bouncing off the show a couple times over the years, I finally sat down and gave it an earnest try, and found that I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would (for reference, I could never enjoy DS9), and this episode in particular really got me hooked to the series overall. I think it did a good job of showing the effectiveness of unions, and more surprisingly, went as far as to depict the government as wanting nothing more than to violently suppress it after delivering empty promises.

Apparently all the episodes are slowly being uploaded to youtube now due to the efforts of the creator of the show, with one new episode every 3 days. If you've ever been interested in trying Babylon 5, now is a good time to start :)

Here's a link to the season 1 playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGVW-aDczak&list=PLGTv90eS-e4I

Personally I enjoyed all of season 1, but the prevailing view is that it really gets its footing in season 2, but I have to say, season 1 has tons of great setup that pays off if you watch through it.

Sequel to Dungeon Crawler Carl. Carl and Donut get to the next level, get into more trouble, get additional skills and levels, and figure more things out. Pretty sure I can reuse the description for all subsequent books in the series. Basically an extension of the first book. If you liked it, you'll like this one. Continues to be dumb fun.

Carl is outside in his boxers trying to get his girlfriend's cat out of a tree when everything with a roof on the planet is destroyed and the smaller number of survivors are made to compete in an intergalactic dungeon game similar to D&D. If this sounds kind of dumb, I described it correctly; it's kind of dumb. It’s also fairly entertaining and has a good amount of heart. People who have played any sort of role playing game, like World Of Warcraft, will probably be extra amused.

Book 8 of the Murderbot Diaries series. Murderbot is sent to rescue some of Mensah’s family members who have been taken hostage on an immense torus built around a dead planet. He has a new emotional status check module, which is equal parts helping and irritating. As usual, the extraction plan doesn't go smoothly. This edition of the series is just okay. It almost seems like Wells was making it up as she went along. It feels like a side story more than a full installment. But it's short and probably worth reading if you've enjoyed the series up till now.

Sequel to City of Last Chances. Yasnic, the (ex)priest from the first book, has been sent to the Palleseen army, forced to help in a hospital that uses a variety of magic-enabled approaches to healing battlefield injuries. He carries his god, along with a couple other small gods he found before being captured, in a box on his back. Whereas the first book was mostly set in a large, diverse city, this one is set in an army camp, which gives the setting a more intimate feel. Tchaikovsky shows his amazing creativity once again; there are concepts here that would have been the whole basis for a novel in someone else's hand, but are just part of the richness of the world here. Though they're pretty different, if you liked the first book, you'll probably like this one.