The Kiwifarms Unofficial Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club

Yeah, which translation are we reading? There's like six of them.
 
I'll probably just do an audiobook of this one. I have a "no rereads" policy, but I'll make an exception.
 
I will be reading this version unless someone finds an improvement on it with annotations and whatnot. There's a lot of conflicting info on translations (especially regarding publication dates), and Wikipedia appears to be wrong, but the gist of it (1) Mercier's is garbage, and (2) some (which?) English translations are based on an abridged version.
 
gmax alcremie said:
Does anyone recommend a specific translation? I've never enjoyed a book translated from fr*nch so I'm skeptical of this one.
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I don't remember what translation I read before but basically don't read the Mercier translation. The Butcher and the Miller/Walter translations are generally regarded as most faithful to the original French text.

Gutenberg has the Walter translation so I'll probably give that a shot.
 
Safir said:
The Jar

OK I didn't get this one, it's just IRL crime. Autistic man murders his wife, puts her remains on display, (hopefully gets arrested and executed).
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There's a Norwegian folk-tale where the wife is a termagant (A), and the story ends with the man drowning her. I wondered if Bradbury was making an allusion. Honestly, the original story is also very upsetting. I liked the "Here, kitty, kitty," line, though.

One Sunday, a wife and husband looked at their cornfield by the side of a river. Seeing that the corn is ready for harvest the husband announces that they must reap it tomorrow. The wife being contrary says that they should clip it instead. This argument goes back and forth as the wife is adamant about the corn being clipped and not reaped. She jumps around, clipping her fingers like shears to emphasize the point.

The husband, hoping to get his way, takes the wife out into the river and holds her head over the water, asking if the corn should still be clipped. The wife angrily replies that the corn should be clipped, causing the husband to push the wife under the water and pull her out again. This argument continues, with the wife being dunked each time. When asked again if the corn should still be clipped the contrary wife replies the same with her still-clipping fingers. This continues until the husband has had enough and drowns the wife.

The next day, the husband, feeling bad that his wife isn't at rest on Christian soil, decides to go with his neighbors and drag the river for his wife. However, they are unable to find the drowned wife. The husband remembers how contrary his wife was and decides to search upstream instead of the normal downstream. Up the river, above a fall, lies the wife, contrary to the flow of the water as she was in life.
 
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My copy is one I got in an airport years ago and it has all the classic illustrations by Edouard Riou.
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This one in particular is iconic, classic sci-fi art.
 
In the beginning where he’s describing the media circus around the ship attacks and the speculation and all that I couldn’t help but be amused by how little people have changed at the end of the day.
I got to the point where they get taken into the sub, and I just have to say Ned Land is just my dude. He’s just a French Canadian whaler who was looking for a narwhal and now he’s the prisoner of an Indian man in a machine he cannot fathom, of course he’s crashing out.
Love the writing so far, I love the more scientific language because we are following a highly educated man and I appreciate books that don’t talk down to their readers.
 
The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
The new Dresden Files book Twelve Months comes out in January. Here's a contest to win copies of all 18 books:
https://www.jim-butcher.com/posts/2025/dresden-sweepstakes https://sites.prh.com/dresdenfilessweepstakes
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This is a new, different contest for Twelve Months only: https://sites.prh.com/twelvemonthssweeps
There She Glows said:
I've been trying to do a reread/catch up of the series in preparation for the new book and I have to be honest I put Battle Ground down a month ago and haven't been able to pick it back up again. I'm going to finish it by the end of the year but the seventeenth book is a real slog.
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Ghost Story was the slog for me.

January 20, 2026 - TWELVE MONTHS, Dresden Files #18
April 14, 2026 - MR. PETTY (Goodman Grey short story) in PARANORMAL PAYBACK ANTHOLOGY
May 12, 2026 - OUT LAW, Dresden novella (sequel to THE LAW)
 
Someone's been trying to get me to read C J Cherryh irl. Any kiwis have recommendations on where to start? Do I just go with Downbelow Station? Faded Sun? Cyteen?
 
Old King Koaleamos said:
Someone's been trying to get me to read C J Cherryh irl. Any kiwis have recommendations on where to start? Do I just go with Downbelow Station? Faded Sun? Cyteen?
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All I've read of hers is Merchanter's Luck, and I thought it was pretty good. If I had Downbelow Station I'd definitely read it.
 
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Years and years ago I this big stack of magazines from a library for free, and I still need to work through them.
Lots of neat stuff though, magazines were fun.
 
If anyone here wants a kino cyberpunk story set in the 2020s-2030s written back in the 1980s, I highly recommend Bruce Sterling’s “Islands in the Net”. It predicts a lot of things somewhat accurately such as drone warfare, and rising corporate influence but also gets some things wrong such as Japan becoming a global power. Fun read.
 
Cyberpunk Meta said:
If anyone here wants a kino cyberpunk story set in the 2020s-2030s written back in the 1980s, I highly recommend Bruce Sterling’s “Islands in the Net”. It predicts a lot of things somewhat accurately such as drone warfare, and rising corporate influence but also gets some things wrong such as Japan becoming a global power. Fun read.
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And in general, the Mirrorshades anthology, which has a lot of the very early stuff that defined the genre, even though almost everyone in it (including Gibson) came to hate and vocally despise the genre. I would bet most people on this thread, and even on this site, actually did read that, though.
 
I enjoyed Jennifer Government. I believe I read it based on a Farms post, but I can’t find that now.

As a book, it doesn’t have great prose, but it’s pretty fun cyberpunk and parts of it made me laugh out loud.
 
Old King Koaleamos said:
Someone's been trying to get me to read C J Cherryh irl. Any kiwis have recommendations on where to start? Do I just go with Downbelow Station? Faded Sun? Cyteen?
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Downbelow is a pretty hefty one, but has a nice intro explaining the history of the setting which I consider utterly critical for understanding the setting. So if you wanna check something else, I can recommend the other novel I checked, Merchanteers Luck, which is much shorter and simpler and has a few recurring characters fro DBS, but lacks the history intro.
 
Old King Koaleamos said:
told a culture wars-breained weeboo-supremacy Fate fan that the Nasuverse originates from the Niven mana tradition and they broke down crying.

Then I told them that it's wonderful how Japan is taking tradition from American portal fantasy/reincarnation stories from our SFF history.
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I thought this was well known. Nasu was a fan of western TTRPGs and especially white wolf games. His ideas for magic and worldbuilding came from VtM and MtA. He talks about this pretty openly and how he was writing his first story (which would eventually become Witch on the Holy Night) while he was really into White Wolf Games.

Pretty much every big dog of Japan's entertainment industry has some kind of western oshi with a big bushy beard and questionable views on sexuality.

(btw - the non-fate entries in the Nasuverse are all fantastic if you like urban/modern fantasy but can't stand the waifushit. Witch on the Holy Night and Tsukihime are both wonderful urban fantasy stories in VN form and Kara no Kyoukai aka The Garden of Sinners has a really good series of film adaptations)
 
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