Jesse > Recent Status Updates

Showing 1,291-1,320 of 3,617
Jesse
Jesse is on page 345 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
“The General”

The ending of this story sort of takes the wind out of the sails of our canny and wise protagonists. It’s exactly as Barr said; the Foundation was, through the engineering of psychohistory, fated to succeed. And, to prove Asimov’s point, the individuals that we followed had pretty much nothing to do with the downfall of The General, which was reliant on the politics of the Empire.
Jul 23, 2024 05:31PM Add a comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 300 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
Foundation and Empire is split into two, longer stories. The framework is similar to the original foundation - some 40 or so years have advanced since the end of the first book - and the chapters still have Asimov’s staggered pacing. It’s good, though, to know that we aren’t closed to finished after this first 50 pages.
Jul 23, 2024 04:05PM Add a comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 257 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
“The Merchant Princes”

What happens when your atomic cult is dreaded by the rest of the galaxy for its exclusivity, with no one wanting to become dependent on your say-so for the continued operation of its technology? Ditch religion, of course, and worship the almighty dollar! The frame job is the most compelling part of this particular story, the longest in the first collection.
Jul 22, 2024 08:38PM Add a comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 175 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
“The Traders”

How do you deal with a system whose ruling government is religiously opposed to nuclear technology? Well, by appealing to their greed and blackmailing them so that they have a vested interest in making nucleics legal, of course.
Jul 22, 2024 02:35PM 1 comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 149 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
“The Mayors”

How does the infant second galactic empire safeguard itself from being swallowed by the neighboring kingdoms that are desperate to control its technological prowess? By relying on their ignorance so that science can become one with religion, thus ensuring that your faux-priest technicians hold all the cards with regard to the control of the technologies that you have gifted.
Jul 22, 2024 02:04PM Add a comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 91 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
“The Encyclopedists”

Okay. This is a pretty good twist, though this story is almost entirely political. The world of the Foundation has been sort of cut off from the Empire and most of the people in charge are more concerned with Encyclopedia Galactica than what do do when they are inevitably occupied by a new Galactic Kingdom.
Jul 22, 2024 09:19AM Add a comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 49 of 752 of The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
“The Psychohistorians”

So, the Foundation series is a sequence of collected short stories that are all related. This one establishes the premise - that a collection of mathematicians / sociologists / scientists are attempting to reduce the impact of the inevitable fall of the galactic empire, reducing the resulting dark age from 30,000 years to 1,000.
Jul 22, 2024 06:52AM 1 comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is starting The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)
Way back when I bought this and Dune, I was more daunted by Dune. In hindsight, Dune was a fantastic read. Most of what I have read about this, a collection of the first three novels in Asimov’s Foundation series, is that it was landmark for sci-fi, but doesn’t really hold up the same way that Dune did. Which, after reading I, Robot, I’m not entirely surprised.
Jul 22, 2024 05:33AM Add a comment
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, #1-3)

Jesse
Jesse is on page 299 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Dart of Rafasa”

I came here with a simple dream, a dream of reading all of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction. And this is how it must end? This is by the numbers sci-fi pulp complete with completely naked heroine and neither the author nor his couple of space explorers can work up any excitement for their predicament. This is so guileless that it reads like deadpan, unwinking satire.
Jul 21, 2024 09:03PM 1 comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 291 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Symposium of the Gorgon”

Uh. This is a farce, where a drunk teleports to a wild party being thrown by the Gorgons mere moments before Perseus arrives. The narrator catches some side-eye from Medusa’s head - an important plot point - before being carried by Pegasus to an island in the South Sea where a tribe of cannibals ATTEMPTS to cook him alive after fattening him up.
Jul 21, 2024 08:48PM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 283 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles”

Hey hey Hyperborea! This is the third story of Satampra Zeiros. Good parts: The dude talks about his time spent with a female accomplice, Vixeela. She is a woman who escaped a prostitution cult and this heist is also, for her at least, a strike back. She even brains the head priest! She could have definitely had a bigger part, though. Veezi steals almost the whole story.
Jul 21, 2024 03:39PM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 273 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Phoenix”

pulp, Bradbury-like sci-fi with a light romantic subplot. This is an “end of the sun” world but, rather than AK-ish Zothique, it’s eternal winter. Scientists from one of the surviving nations has developed and implements an interstellar payload to rekindle the dead sun and thus rejuvenate the Earth. The romantic subplot, well, it doesn’t take a genius to anticipate no mission survivors.
Jul 21, 2024 12:04PM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 263 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Monsters in the Night”

Okay I was prepared to breeze through this flash fiction but it’s delightfully fun, marinating in the thought process of a werewolf who is looking for a kill. He finds his target, but! Surprise! It’s a fucking android??? Just some fun horror / sci-fi.
Jul 21, 2024 11:47AM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 259 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Schizoid Creator”

A goofy Diabolist story where a psychiatrist tries to summon the devil because he believes that the devil is merely another aspect of God and he has schizophrenia, and he wants to cure him. The satirical follow-through is that the man gets the wrong devil but he’s not entirely incorrect about God and Satan. Unfortunately for him, God / Satan isn’t the least bit schizophrenic.
Jul 21, 2024 07:49AM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 253 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Morthylla”

The last Zothique story 😭and it’s pretty perfect and VERY CAS. Poet is bored with the excesses of life; his patron jokingly suggests he visit a necropolis where the lamia Morthylla is said to live. He goes there and does indeed meet a woman who claims she is the lamia. The two twists that follow make this tight prose poem one of my favorite Smith fantasies.
Jul 20, 2024 09:27PM 2 comments
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 245 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Master of the Crabs”

Seafaring sword and sorcery in Zothique. This one references the necromantic isle of Naat and, uh, has Smith’s preoccupation with shark-toothed, dark-skinned cannibals. It’s a fair enough minor adventure story where the heroes succeed in their mission, a rarity in Zothique. It also has several lethal cases of crabs… which you may have gathered from the title.
Jul 20, 2024 07:23AM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 232 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Nemesis of the Unfinished”

A goofy semi-autobiographical story about a writer who can’t finish his stories and all of the unfinished manuscripts rebel, finishing themselves in a style that is far more akin to Smith’s personal style with regard to word-choice and detailing. His ego can’t take any of this, and so he dies in a battle with the piles of paper. Huh.
Jul 20, 2024 06:46AM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 227 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Double Cosmos”

A scientist conjectures that the hallucinations that drug-users experience are actually glimpses into aspects of reality that we cannot ordinarily perceive. So he makes a super-drug and opens up his mind to the fourth dimension. It’s way less gnarly than your average extra-dimensional Smith adventure.
Jul 20, 2024 06:29AM 1 comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 219 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Enchantress of Sylaire”

This is a rewrite of his “The End of the Story”, but with more sex. “Indeed, he proved it so lengthily and in such detail that the sun had fallen below the horizon before Séphora could draw a full breath and speak again.” I guess that there is a werewolf ex-boyfriend sorcerer and… idk what was going on with the Mirror of Reality but it reflected poorly on Dorothée!!!!!!!!
Jul 19, 2024 04:41PM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 207 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“Strange Shadows”

This is recognizably Smith in how he describes the titular shadows, but the tone is… different? Jones the alcoholic feels like one of Smith’s more fully-realized characters, a dude who spuriously gains access to the shadows cast by living things, with the actions of these shadows betraying something of the true nature of the people who cast them.
Jul 19, 2024 04:05PM 2 comments
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 195 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Great God Awto”

This is one of those satires where archaeologists pick over the remains of contemporary culture and come to bizarre conclusions. Smith is mad at automobiles and depicts the perception of present-day America as a death-cult of, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, “suicide machines”. The notes here are indispensable in adding the context of Smith as something of a Luddite.
Jul 18, 2024 04:03PM Add a comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 189 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Garden of Adompha”

A tale of bizarre debauchery in Zothique, where a warped king and his sorcerer graft the body parts of courtiers onto plants that feed off of the buried bodies. It’s pretty gross, even if the king gets his comeuppance in the end. If you think that you killed a sorcerer in Zothique, well, don’t stick around wherever he died!!!
Jul 18, 2024 02:39PM 1 comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Jesse
Jesse is on page 181 of 360 of The Last Hieroglyph
“The Mother of Toads”

UMMMMM

OKAY

Dude is drugged into having sex with the toad-witch-woman and then wakes up, completely grossed out. He tries to escape but… a tidal wave of toads sends him back to her hut, and… when he spurns her second advance, calling her a fat toad, she lets him go… only to drown him in the bog, smothering him under her huge titties.

I had no idea something like this was coming
Jul 18, 2024 01:54PM 1 comment
The Last Hieroglyph

Follow Jesse's updates via RSS