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What did everyone think of the animal-centric chapters away from ST sprinkled thought the book? Honestly other than like 2 they felt super forgettable to me and really didn't do the sort of worldbuilding I would have liked from them.

I 100% agree about the most touching moments being all highlights. ST's descriptions of family life are so heartwarming, so genuine and wholesome, but they're intelligently held back most of the time and only revealed sparingly, making them feel very weighty which I liked. And his grief remains...

Welcome to MafiEra's book club discussion for October. This month, we read: Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton Personally I really enjoyed it and can't wait to read some impressions. I vow to try and be more active in this thread, and will provide my thoughts later, but unfortunately I...

Also, here's a Q&A with the author about the book: https://www.space.com/exhalation-stories-ted-chiang-interview.html

It's worth pointing out that Automatic Nanny was originally published as part of a "themed" short story compilation by different authors, which was supposed to work like a "cabinet of curiosities", so that's why it's not so much a story as much as it is a "description" of a hypothetical item. It...

I loved most of the stories. If I had to pick favorites, they'd probably be The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate and The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. Alchemist Gate really captures the feeling of an Arabian Nights-esque story, it reads like a parable and I really enjoyed how the...

Yep, those descriptions were great. I wonder if that first planet was a nod to Flatland, the description is too close for it to be a coincidence IMO :D

In terms of tropes, it's somewhere between Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and The Singularity (Warning: TV Tropes links), of which there are a lot of examples so I think that's why it seems familiar to people. The latter of those seems to have the most relevant examples in literature...

I don't think we got many details about how they communicated with the Overmind if at all, but they collaborated with it to find what they could about the weird science/PSI powers their race had no access to so they could eventually attempt to ascend themselves, as far as I could tell.

It's a shame you disliked the book @Pedro , I would still recommend you finish it as I thought it was very much worth reading (and I also enjoy everything I've read from Clarke), but I also understand your points and they're probably major enough to drop it entirely. Sucks that I was excited...

I'll go with both scientists (the one who helps UN guy build the flashing device, but specially the one with the submarine lab because he had some sort of kraken pet?). I thought it was hilarious how little convincing they needed to just go along with the anti-Overlord plans. They both just went...

Actually I'd say this novel proposed the opposite, that there were things that were unknowable to science. Even the Overlords recognized that they couldn't explain (for example) the ouija episode and had kinda given up on it being explained by the scientific method. Per Wikipedia's article on...

Oh, and I'd like to know about the TV series if anyone watched it. Does it even follow the book's structure at all?

Yeah. Maybe the fact that everyone, even each section's "main characters" is so 2-dimensional and basically stand-ins for different arguments within the context of what's happening in each section makes me somewhat forgiving of the fact that as far as I can tell, all characters with more than 5...

This was probably my third time reading the book? I read it something like 12 years ago (oh, god) and reread it very shortly afterwards. I remember loving it then, and I would still say that it's very much worth reading. I like Clarke's style here in general, the focus on the changes the...