On the other hand, this Dan Simmons puzzle still need answering.
I’ve been trying for FOURTEEN years, and I’m pretty proud of myself, but I just can’t stand it any longer.
I gotta know, do people think W is really gonna go to war with Iraq?
I think he will. And it will be a cakewalk, the troops will be home by 2004, easy.
If M had just read five pages a month, he’d be finished by now.
Book groups sound fun, in a strange sort of way. How do I find one, as a complete outsider to the concept?
Start one. That’s what we do.
Still doing monthly movie discussion groups, though we are in a “new” city since I started this thread. 18 years going strong.
General format is we pick movies ahead of time, everybody watches it on their time, then we meet to eat and discuss.
Attend a local science fiction convention, or hang around a local book store (or game store: lots of overlap.)
(Or look up n3f.org – fair amount of online sf discussion.)
“My life is a shambles.”
“Flashback” was the one I was talking about. I have no problem with writers taking a political bent, even when it’s in a direction other than mine but the politics have to serve the story, not the other way around.
Wow, I sure was passionate about stuff 14 years ago.
Sigh.
What is “Barnes and Noble”? 
I wish I’d seen this thread originally. I’d have had a lot to say about your misperceptions of the Uplift series, JohnT.
The series is great, and the kids (all aliens) in *Brightness Reef *are only one subset of a larger set of protagonists (and only one of the kids is a POV character). And the initial isolation there is the whole point.
Barnes & Noble, Inc., is a Fortune 500 company, the largest retail bookseller in the United States, and a leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products in the country.
You’re thinking of Borders, which is a chain of empty buildings.
Public libraries are another place to find (or start up) a book group.
I don’t like to make fun of somebody for something they said fourteen years ago. But I thought it was ironic that after condemning Brightness Reef because it was set on a single planet, JohnT went on the say “Earth was different” and how much he loved it.
Met my husband when we both worked at a Borders. We drove past that store last night - it’s still empty, has been for almost a decade now. It’s a huge building, a former freestanding Nieman Marcus, you would think they’d put in at least the occasional SPIRIT Halloween store, but nooooo
I don’t think you read my OP at all.
My problem with the Uplift books was not that they were set on a single planet, it was that Brin constructed this vast, interesting universe… then filled his damn stories with people trying not to communicate with the vast, interesting universe while hiding on primitive planets. Repeatedly. Then, with the second series… well, he did it again in Brightness Reef.
But he didn’t do this in Earth.
And I’m not the biggest fan of kids in science fiction. At least I wasn’t in 2002, so that didn’t help.
I’d start out by checking on Meetup. If there isn’t a group near you, you can at least attempt to start one.
Reminds me of the time a few years ago I overheard a Borders clerk trying to help a customer in the SF racks who used to read SF a long time ago, and now wanted to read some of the new authors. The clerk clearly didn’t have a clue and said, “Well, here’s a new author!” It was Ben Bova. :smack:
At that point, the customer politely said he’d help himself, thanks. He was in the B’s, so I figured he could find some good stuff on his own.
It’s not like he really built a whole universe. He, in fact, only constructs the bits you get to see, and those bits are relevant because they are the bits our protagonists interact with. Sundiver, the first book, is all about communication and discovering new things about the Universe. Yes,* Startide Rising* is all about hiding out on a primitive planet - but we learn a lot about the Galactics - enough to know that their actual societies are likely boring to read about.
It’s the same reason very little of Banks’ Culture stories are set in the Culture proper.
That’s only the starting scenario. It gets very different later on.
1 out of 6-or-so Point of View protagonists is an alien kid trying to write a diary in the style of Mark Twain. Another POV character is a sentient conical stack of Communist inner tubes…
if 2002 thought this was a story about kids, you must not have read more than…
…5 pages.