Which Book Are You Reading Now? Volume XII

[caketastydelish]

Does anyone have some good full length novels of the pulp genre they could recommend to me ?

 

[onejayhawk]

Does anyone have some good full length novels of the pulp genre they could recommend to me ?

Science Fiction is full of them. The Song of Ice and Fire is the basis for Game of Thrones. Flint's 1632 series is up to about 15 books. The first two are available for free download at Baen's free library. Ditto the Honor Harrington saga by David Weber. The final book of that series literally hit the stands this week.

J

 

[caketastydelish]

Any pulp in that takes place in the 20th or 21st century.

 

[Takhisis]

I don't know whether it qualifies as ‘pulp’ but I'll nevertheless recommend that you read Slan by A.E. van Vogt.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Pulp fiction is pretty broad
HP Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs all wrote pulp fiction
I'd recommend Damon Runyon, I like his writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Runyon

 

[caketastydelish]

thanks, everyone. After doing enough research of my own I decided to go with Tom Clancy.

 

[Narz]

Mike Tyson - Undisputed Truth

biographies are great

 

[onejayhawk]

Clancy is not exactly pulp, but he is light reading--at length. If you like that, consider the work of le'Carre and old James Bond books. For WW II era, try Ken Follett and Frederick Forsyth. Some people like Alan Furst.

J

 

[JollyRoger]

 

[Traitorfish]

thanks, everyone. After doing enough research of my own I decided to go with Tom Clancy.

Tom Clancy is "pulp"? Usually the term describes something that draws on low-budget novellas and anthology magazines from the early-to-mid century- Conan, Doc Savage, that sort of thing. It's not usually used just to mean "mass-market genre fiction".

 

[JohannaK]

yeah, those are like, uh, best-sellers. Right?

 

[Dachs]

Fritz Leiber = pulp
Tom Clancy = not that

 

[Ajidica]

Does anyone have some good full length novels of the pulp genre they could recommend to me ?

Assuming by "pulp" you mean fun adventure novels that don't take themselves too seriously.

1) King David's Spaceship by Jerry Pournelle. Good light fun that manages to avoid some of Pournelle's more controversial ideas.
2) The Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski. They've been out long enough stateside that it should be easy to pick up the English translations in any secondhand bookstore.
3) The Gaea Trilogy by John Varley (Titan, Wizard, and Demon). One of the few sci fi authors I've encountered who can write half decent female characters.
4) Sir MacHinery by Tom McGowan. It is an old book, but easily one of my favorites since I read it when I was ten. An American scientist moves to a Scottish castle to build a robot, but the robot gets stolen by elves who think the robot is a medieval knight and need the knight/robot to free Merlin.

 

[Takhisis]

3) The Gaea Trilogy by John Varley (Titan, Wizard, and Demon). One of the few sci fi authors I've encountered who can write half decent female characters.

This sounds interesting. I'll keep an eye out for it.

 

[Ajidica]

This sounds interesting. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Demon is far an away my favorite of the three. If you are only going to read one of them, I would recommend Demon and just read the wiki summaries for the other two. The books are sort of a psychedelic/hippy version of Ringworld.

 

[onejayhawk]

Let me throw out the Millenium Trilogy. You probably know it by the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. The second and third books are The Girl Who Played with Fire in 2006, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. All three were published posthumously. Stieg Larsson died in 2004 (age 50). In 2013 his publisher commissioned another series of books with the same lead characters. To date, we have The Girl in the Spider's Web, 2015, and The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, 2017.

All the books were written in Swedish.

J

 

[Zkribbler]

Any pulp in that takes place in the 20th or 21st century.

Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries, starting with Devil in a Blue Dress.

...John Varley (Titan, Wizard, and Demon). One of the few sci fi authors I've encountered who can write half decent female characters.

Is this even allowed?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

A Naturalist's Guide to Forest Plants: An Ecology for Eastern North America by Donald Cox is a fine introduction. It starts with a introduction to basic plant physiology, then a rundown of seasonal vs. ecological seasons, a list of plants of interest, and finishes with the naming and collection of plants.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Ah, cool. Haven't bought it yet but it's on my reading list. I've watched a couple of interviews with Tyson where he brought it up and they were really intrigiung.
I assume the book is mostly about about the post WW2 era ?
The connections between SPACE! and military are quite obvious there.
How much time does he spend on the historical importance of astrology ? The Columbus anecdote was amusing/infuriating, but what about pre-renaissance ?

He spent the first half of the book talking about the pre-WWII era. I'd say 60% of the first half of the book is spent in ancient or prehistorical times and then the rest of the first half around the Renaissance. I assume the rest of the book will be set post-WWII (I'm half way through).

He spent half a chapter (all together) on astrology and he doesn't heap scorn on it either. It was all bunk, of course, but he doesn't veer into condescension of it.

I'm guessing that there will be at least some discussion of the longitude problem and its importance for navies in the early modern period and beyond.

Yup, he covered it at length and did a great job of illustrating how fast the pace of change of technology picked up right around the time the first all-weather clocks were invented.

every time I read something Tyson writes or says about the history of religion I want to claw my own eyes out

does he do that in this text

if not, it may be a winner

Nope he really doesn't touch on religion at all in this book. I think you'd like it.


This book is a great companion to the Civilization video game series. He walks from the birth of astronomy in prehistory all the way through the present, pointing out the key military technologies brought to the world by the astro-science community and the impact of these technologies. He is light on history in the sense that I don't think he's trying to pull together a grand narrative that stretches credibility and the source material. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about the fate of individual empires or nations or even wars for that matter.

What I mean is that this isn't a Guns, Germs and Steel type of book. He covers a lot of technologies and events in history but he doesn't have much of a central thesis beyond the obvious fact that technology is key to warfare and scientists have been complicit (even dependent) on the patronage of the military throughout time. The book is better for this.


One story that I really liked is that of adaptive optics. It's one of the few cases where the military invented something and held it secret for years before throwing it over the fence to the science community. Most often these sorts of advances come to the science community at the same time as the military because they are developing them together. In this instance, the theory of adaptive optics was understood but no researchers could pull together the funds and cross-disciplinary teams to reduce it to practice.

That wasn't a problem with the military who wanted these optics to spy on overhead satellites. They developed it in secret and had it for a couple of decades before calling an astrophysics conference and sending one of their officers to declassify the technology for the benefit of science live at the conference. It was a cool story.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

A Tale of Seven Elements by Eric Scerri starts with an introduction to the history of the periodic table before its seven main chapters, each about one of the last pre-uranic elements to be discovered.

• Element 91 was named protactinium ("mother of actinium") by the group led by Lise Meitner. Its main application is in the dating of ocean sediments.
• Element 72 was named hafnium (Latin for Copenhagen) after the Dutch-Hungarian team led by Georg von Hevesy prevailed in the nationalistic priority dispute over a French-British team. It finds use as a neutron absorber and in high melting point alloys.
• Element 75 was named rhenium ("Rhine") by a team lead by the Noddack couple. It is the element with largest range of oxidation states, and its applications include catalysts and hard alloys.
• Element 43 was named technetium (Greek for artificial) by an Italian team led by Emilio Segrè after many false starts by other teams. Its main use is as a medical radioisotope probe.
• Element 87 was named francium ("France") by a team led by Margeurite Perey. Too rare to find commercial use, it is mainly used for investigations into the electroweak interaction and other facets of atomic physics.
• Element 85, astatine (Greek for unstable), was another discovery by the Segrè team. The rarest natural element on Earth, its use in radiotherapy is being investigated.
• Element 61 was named promethium ("Prometheus") by the team led by Jacob Marinsky, after further development of the techniques of ion exchange chromatography and artificial elemental synthesis. Its main use is in radioisotope thermal generators.

The book ends with a short chapter on the synthesis of transuranic elements, ending at the time of writing in 2012 with preliminary results on Element 118 (which is now confirmed and named as oganesson). The book is a breezy but informative read, which doesn't dwell too long on facets of the researchers' lives that aren't related to the topic.