So @wyattsalazar, I was listening to the first part of the first episode of Book Hell and I couldn’t help but notice you guys trying to remember the name of a book that had weird human-monkey people from the future in it. As it so happens, I know exactly what you were talking about.
The book you were looking for was called Man After Man, by the British paleontologist and author Dougal Dixon. As it so happens, Man After Man is the last of three books he wrote playing with the concept of “speculative evolution.” The first (below) was After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Published in 1981, it was an overview of life all around the world 50 million years from now, long after our extinction. If memory serves, there were a whole lot of rabbit-deer and rat-wolves running around.
The second was 1988′s The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. The premise for that was that the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction of 65 million years ago never occurred, and the dinosaurs (and a whole bunch of other critters) were allowed to survive and evolve in peace to the present day. Personally, I think it’s the best book of the three, but then again I have a pro-dinosaur bias, so interpret that as you will.
Man After Man came out in 1990, and it’s something of the black sheep of the trilogy. According to Dixon, his original idea for the book was to write a sequel to After Man in which humans, using time travel to flee the dying Earth of the modern day, arrive in the new world of 50 million years hence, and proceed to rebuild civilization and muck the planet up all over again. For whatever reason the idea fell through (though it did get reused for a space-colonization story that was only ever published in Japan), and Dixon wrote Man After Man instead, despite having no real desire to do so. I don’t like the book myself, partially because I feel it it delves too deeply into stock sci-fi tropes, chief among them telepathy, for a “serious” work of biological extrapolation, but also because I find the idea of creatures who wear the faces of humans but have the minds of animals to be...deeply unsettling. Still, it did give us a few good memes.
“Cats that look like Lenin” really should be a thing.
Котик революционер
“Oh, and if you’ve been possessed by a sentient alien being, you’re gonna want to go across the quad to the Dexter Remmick Memorial Medical Center. Victims of energy beings meet up in 512, but if you were bodyjacked by a malevolent parasite you’ll wanna to head down to 337. Benevolent parasites are on 212, God knows why.”
The scary thing is that Starfleet probably needs a separate support group for “people who have accidentally lived decades/entire lifetimes in alternate realities until it turned out it was just an hour in the real world.”
What? Oh, no, you’re looking for the “I was caught in a timeloop and went insane” support group. That’s next door.
“Mirror Universe trauma”? Down the hall.
“Dealing With My Duplicate Self” meets on Thursdays.
(O’Brien just attends all of them. If it hasn’t happened, it’s probably going to.)
I used to have a friend who was pretty big into both WW2 militaria and animé, and she used to argue that people in both these groups have a bad habit of adopting imagery from Wilhelmite Germany in substitution for Nazi imagery as a way to glamorizing German militarism without being immediately accused of pro-Nazi sympathies. Now she was very hard-left politically, and some of this may have been hyperbolic. Still, this something that has given me pause, and I feel that Tanya the Evil does straddle the line, particularly in the later installments when WW2-era technology starts appearing. Still, while I don’t want to die on the “let people dress like Nazis!” hill, I would not ban Tanya cosplay on the grounds that it depicts a “fictitious Nazi organization,” because it bloody well doesn’t and a personal interpretation of subtext is not the same thing as out-and-out pro-Nazi propaganda, and if it is then we might as well cut out the middleman and just start arresting people because we don’t like them.
Well… that’s dumb.
The unnamed battlefield medic who shows up to evac downed units also made her debut in Skies of Arcadia as Fina, though according to her ingame bio she’s actually three people in VC1: the triplets Fina, Mina, and Gina Sellers.
Watching you play Valkyria Chronicles I saw some familiar faces - Vyse and Aika are main characters from Skies of Arcadia. Vyse is kind of a tool but Aika's my homegirl. In said game they fight against the Empress of Valua, and I noticed there's also a city called Valua mentioned in passing during your video.
Oh I thought I’d seen those characters somewhere! I think one of the main dudes behind ValCro had a hand in Skies of Arcadia (it was also published by Sega too if I remember correctly). That’s a neat little thing. Thank you!
The X-Files is interesting in this context, since even though Mulder and Scully are our heroes and we love them, they are still FBI agents, actual official representatives of the greater American monoculture who are tasked with going to the backwaters and forgotten places and dealing with the strange and deviant for the good of the whole. To their credit, the people writing The X-Files recognized this, and there’s plenty of episodes where they depict their monsters-of-the-week with some sympathy, or handle Mulder and Scully’s incursions with a note of ambivalence.
Old tv shows where the hero visits the 'town of the week' and identifies then solves a unique problem before moving on are so weird to watch now. "Route 66" to "Touched by an Angel" and etc. Any town in North America that still actually has a unique local culture wouldn't be receptive to an outsider pushing their nose into the local affairs.
Who even still thinks of turning to a pack of kind-hearted outlaws when the bank comes to foreclose on their orphanage?
Well, as it turns out, I managed to pick the right ship.
This big beautiful girl here is the U.S.S. Madiha Nakar, NX-122030. While she is what Star Trek Online calls a “science command battlecruiser” (even though she’s bigger than the Enterprise-D, she’s a “battlecruiser”), her appearance is a kitbash of the saucer and neck of the Geneva-class science CBC with the engineering hull, nacelles, and pylons of a Presidio-class tactical CBC.
As the name implies, her main role in battle is to command and support the rest of the fleet. To that end she has a hangar deck full of runabouts to harass and hinder enemy ships, three types of automated turrets to deploy around the battlefield, and the ability to give massive bonuses to other ships in her team if she survives in combat and uses a lot of abilities. (She could also be further optimized with bridge officers with specialized command abilities, but I prefer to be a space wizard and throw science magic all over the place.)
As for loadouts, I’ve kitted her out with a whole pile of Romulan endgame gear (hence the green), which means that in battle she spends most of her time spraying firey green death plasma in every direction. She’s not my favorite starship in STO, but whenever I need to throw a lot of damage at something and I’m not sure what’s waiting for me, she’s the one I go to and she’s always served me well.
Stupid-serious question: if Madiha Nakar was a starship, what kind of starship would she be?
Some kind of flagship with a lot of battlefield analysis and C&C equipment.
I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.
the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭
There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.
“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”
That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.
Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.
Hello there! I'm nesterov81, and this tumblr is a dumping ground for my fandom stuff. Feel free to root through it and find something you like.
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