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posted by martyb on Sunday September 02 2018, @09:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the In-just-over-three-months-it-would-be...-Mars-Ho-Ho-Ho! dept.

Want to read some books? Many of our users have shown interest in having a book club. Now it's finally time to kick it off.

Your soytyrant has pre-selected the first three books so that you have more time to read them, should you choose to do so:

September: Mars, Ho! by Stephen McGrew
October: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
November: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.

The plan is to read a book, and discuss it on the 1st of the following month. Suggestions for new books (of any genres, not just "science fiction") will also be collected at the same time. You can start listing some of your suggestions right now in this comment section. We'll pick up to eight of them and run a poll on September 15th to decide the book for December. And so on.

The first book is Mars, Ho! by Stephen McGrew, one of our more literary users (not to be confused with Mars Ho! by Jennifer Willis). The book is available for free on McGrew's website, although there are some purchasing options available if you want to support him. From the description:

Captain John Knolls thinks he's just been given the best assignment of his career -- ferrying two hundred prostitutes to Mars. He doesn't know that they're all addicted to a drug that causes them to commit extreme, deadly violence when they are experiencing withdrawal or that he'll face more pirates than anyone had ever seen before. Or that he'd fall in love. A humorous science fiction space novel, a horror story, a love story, a pirate story, a tale of corporate bureaucracy and incompetence.

All book club posts will be in the Community Reviews nexus, which is linked to on the site's sidebar. You'll likely want to click on that link once the posts fall off the main page.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:07PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:07PM (#729538)

    Snow Crash is an awesome book.

    Beware though, because of the Overton window shifts, a book that was vaguely centrist to tiling slightly leftist in 1992 when it was published is now occasionally seen as Nazi right wing red pill double plus ungood badthink. I've seen some real shit talking about that book in recent years because the girl is not a martial artist as all little girls must be today, and some side character comments about homosexuality would not be San Francisco approved, and from memory an Asian has words because black guys steal stuff all the time (bikes, cars, etc) so he accuses a black guy of obtaining his sword by theft, which would be common sense up until the last couple years. The first chapter starts with some fat-shaming about how Hiro's delivery car has tires as wide as Amy Schumers thighs (just kidding, he said "fat ladies thighs". Also his parody of Dominos Pizza is not going to resonate with anyone younger than 40. Similar to many cultural icons such as the TV show Friends or older Trek, what was center-left in the 90s is declared Nazi in the late 10s. Not that I mind, personally. Just saying that's gonna be a fun "political" one to review, its a very red pilling kind of book.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:08PM (#729539)

    Fuck that LISP code is never gonna compile, here's my lost rparen

    )

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @08:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @08:41AM (#735237)

      }

      # Here to help

  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:45PM (#729550)

    Ugh, do you have to ruin Snow Crash too?

    Go away you alt-right jackasd.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @09:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @09:49PM (#729660)

    That sounds kinda weird. It's not like cyberpunk is all about sunshine and rainbows.