Tony’s Comments (group member since Dec 19, 2018)

Tony’s comments from the Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy group.

I have finished The Dark Forest. An excellent sequel but not, I thought, quite as good as The Three-Body Problem. It has a very different tone.

Welcome to May - at least in Australasia and eastern Asia 😁I'm currently about halfway through The Dark Forest and thoroughly enjoying it.

Welcome to both of you David and Chris. This is a pretty friendly and laid back group, and there are a number of other authors who contribute here.

My first exposure to A Clockwork Orange was the movie, which I liked. I understand Burgess wasn't happy with the movie adaptation of his novel, and (after reading the novel sometime later) I could see that there were certainly some differences, but I don't think the movie was a terrible adaptation.

I have finished reading The Three-Body Problem. It thoroughly deserves its reputation and the awards it has won. Now onto The Dark Forest.

Dune rightly deserves its place as one the great science fiction novels. Dune Messiah's only good point is that its short, but I thought Children of Dune was quite good. I tried God Emperor and gave up and didn't bother with the next two. I have read some of the prequel series, and they're not bad.

I've started reading the graphic novel Alien Armageddon 1944, which is aliens invade on D-Day. I backed the Kickstarter for it, and the digital version has just been distributed but the physical copies are still being printed, which is likely why there isn't a Goodreads entry for it yet - I'll create one when I get a chance.

Australia, like all Western democracies, has had a rise in right wing extremism in recent years, but there have been a few factors that have limited the influence of that here. For a start, Australia has a generally more progressive society than America. Politicians in America who would be considered "corporate democrats" would, for the most part, be in the conservative parties here. The conservative government, which had held power on the national level for about a decade, was defeated in a landslide in the last election because of their growing push towards right wing extremism. They lost a lot of safe seats - not to the Labor party, but to independents who are fiscally conservative but socially progressive. The other major factors that have inhibited the rise of right wing extremism are that Australia has an independent body called the Australian Electoral Commission, and it is their job to define the electoral boundaries for elections, so gerrymandering is not a serious issue here; and finally, voting in Australia is compulsory, which limits the success of only appealing to your base, and stops the purging of voter rolls. The AEC also controls voter registration.

Isabella wrote: "The idea that a simple majority was enough to change our membership was ridiculous."

My understanding is that Brexit didn't even get a simple majority - it got a majority of the people who bothered to vote, but not a majority of the voting public.

Michelle wrote: "There are no decent presidential candidates anymore. I feel as if I always settle for voting for the lesser of the two evils. We need a better system!"

Doing away with the Electoral College would be a good start.

I finished Æther & Empire Volume 01: Eternal Glory. I enjoyed it, although it is a story where the artwork is certainly superior to the story, which I found to be a bit disjointed and with a bit of a weak ending. The artwork was beautiful and had lots of steampunk richness and detail.

I have started reading The Three-Body Problem, and I have started the graphic novel Æther & Empire Volume 01: Eternal Glory

I have finished EMERGENT MARS. The author gave me a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review, which I have left on Goodreads. I enjoyed the book - it's a near future tale of the conflict between Earth and Mars (not necessarily military) over Mars desiring to be an independent world. This also fills my indie author Bingo slot.

Whilst it is April Fools Day, this won't be a joke post 😊I have finished The Boys, Vol. 12: The Bloody Doors Off, which brings to an end my read through of The Boys comic series. As a series, it thoroughly deserved all the accolades it received, and it did present a scenario of what may actually happen in the "real world" if superpowers did develop. The ending was surprisingly upbeat, and, although I have only watched the 1st season of the Amazon Prime show, I am surprised at how quickly it deviated from the source material.

Subscription services and built-in obsolescence are just examples of capitalism allowed to develop unchecked for many years. This started (or, rather, became more public) in the 80s with Reagan Presidency and the "greed is good" attitude and the current situation shows what 40 years of allowing corporate profit to be the sole goal develops. The health care situation in the US is a prime example, and the Tory governments in the UK, and the Coalition governments in Australia have been doing what they can to bring that situation to those countries - although the Labour / Labor governments in those countries are by no means absolved from blame - they have both been very happy to give in to corporate interests over the good of the electorate for much of the last 40 years. Fortunately, there are signs that the younger generation now coming of voting age is keen to support more progressive policies, and the corporatocracies threatening to become the default governments in the West may not be successful.

I have finished The Boys, Vol. 11: Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men and started on The Boys, Vol. 12: The Bloody Doors Off, which is the final volume of the collected editions of The Boys.

Andrea wrote: "Unfortunately the eBook seems to be a scan it has some spectacular typos (like all double ll's are replaced by a capital U), I'll see how bad it is, might have to give up on it. Amazingly when I got it free it was a promotion, usually people have to pay...but who'd pay for all those typos, that's terrible"

Really reliable OCR can be expensive. We use it a bit at work, but it's really important to get it right. I'm in the IT side of the legal industry, so replacing a ll with a U may not go down well in a lot of situations 😁 It's probably not something that is affordable for scanning old novels to make digital versions, although this is an area where the increasing sophistication of AI will be useful.

I haven't had to do that, but I generally stay logged in to Goodreads for days or weeks at a time.

I have started the penultimate volume of The Boys - The Boys, Volume 11: Over the Hills with the Swords of a Thousand Men

I have started reading EMERGENT MARS - the author offered me a free copy in exchange for an honest review, and I am continuing The Boys with The Boys, Vol. 10: Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker