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March: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis Taylor
Discuss The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein in the comments below.
Fiasco was translated into English in 1988 by Michael Kandel:
Fiasco (Polish: Fiasko) is a science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem, first published in a German translation in 1986. The book, published in Poland the following year, is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.
Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation • The Three-Body Problem • Snow Crash
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SoylentNews Book Club - Discuss: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Start Reading: Fiasco
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Krogt, n. (chemical symbol: Kr):
The metallic silver coating found on fast-food game cards.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday February 13 2019, @04:52AM (3 children)
Agree about Stu, he did just seem to jump right in, but on the other hand he may have really believed that Manny saved his life at the trial.
We really don't know about that. We know zero is bad, but nobody has lived in low gravity for any longer than the Apollo astronauts, and that was only a few days. Low gravity and an indoor life with no weather or UV is definitely going to make people look younger.
Also, low gravity and a magnetic field are different things. If you are referring to radiation then shielding works too, and piling 14 pounds of rock* on each square inch of your habitat sounds like a good way to stop the air pressure blowing the roof off.
*That's 14 pounds in lunar gravity. Would be 84 on earth, and that's a lot of shielding.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:25PM (2 children)
I always took Stu (and indeed the entire book) as a semi-proxy for the American Revolutionary War, with Stu being somebody like Pierre L'Enfant [wikipedia.org], or one of the other French noblemen who threw their resources into supporting the cause of US Independence. As such, I never worried too much about his nebulous motivations, as "fiction reflects real life."
The thing I never understood was that early reveal that "Manny is female!" They make a big deal of it, but then it turns out to have no bearing or influence on the story... and indeed was entirely neglected. I always took it to be an early draft idea which got missed during the later revisions and edits. Maybe I'm missing something, though.
(At least it's better than the post-hoc, "by the way, Dumbledore is gay" style of character development...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @08:52PM
Yep, you're missing something all right. There is no "reveal" of the gender of Manny, because *he* is a Hetero-Cis male:
I can only assume that you haven't read the novel, are trolling or both.
But you go girl! Wow! There's a reveal for you! OP AC is female!
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:16AM
Well the other AC thinks you are trolling, but I think you meant Mike, not Manny. There is a scene where Wyoh is telling Mike jokes and it laughs at all the same ones as women, not men. You are right that it didn't make much difference to the rest of the book. Heinlein did that a fair bit, threw in a lot of stuff that filled out the story and gave him possible plot hooks for later. He didn't always use them.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.