Sci Fi!

Hello everyone!
Today is book day! Yay! Truly one of the only things I've always loved and always will.

So... My favorite books are huge classics, so I think that you must have already read them; if you haven't... they are worth a look, definitely.

Brave new world, by Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) and Orwell's 1984 (aka Big Brother is watching you ^^) are really difficult to read, because you just want to scream in horror and close the book, and you are grateful, page by page, not to be in such a civilization. The hardest part though is seeing how the world you are in could so easily turn into one of those universe. And it is a terrifying experience, but definitely worth your time; it will probably make you think (even) more.

For those of you who do not like Sci Fi a lot, or who do not have a lot of time, ... I would recommend short stories:
-Asimov's wrote about robots, (and if I'm not putting any title, it is because I don't think the same anthologies were published in French and English, but if you go to any good library, you will find some) (if you have any choice, I would recommend those featuring Dr. Susan Calvin) (I, robot; Robot dreams...).
-Bradbury's Martian Chronicles are a marvel, a jewel... Poetry and humor, I just loved them (but I'm a huge Bradbury fan).
-Lafferty, maybe not so known, is just totally insane, and I love what he writes. It is quite... weird, but Does anyone else has something further to add ? is great, funny... (You will probably hate him or love him). And anything else I could add would spoil it, so... try to read some, and tell me what you think (short stories, will only take a couple of minutes to read anyway, so if you do not like, you won't have lost a lot of time).


For those who, on the opposite, have a lot of time on their hands, try Orson Scott Card's works. Ender's game is amazing, the psychology of the students and "teachers" in that universe is truly fascinating, and it is one of the rare adult books where kids won't feature as stupid/immature. (And if you like it, you have 5 other books coming, either featuring Ender or one of his companions, you'll see). It can be quite violent some times though, and harsh.
If you're more a fantasy person, you can try Alvin's Chronicles (I loved the first book, the next ones not so much).
(OH MY! I was doing some research for the English names of the books in that article and I just found out that he had published a sequel to the Shadows stories (part of the Ender cycle) and I am just soooooooo excited!!!!! I'll have to wait till this summer to read it though. Sad, sad, sad, sad. Well, back to the point.)


There is an anthology I would have loved to tell you about, but it only exists in French, apparently, so it would be useless for a lot of you; I'm going to stop here.


Well... Have a nice day, tell me if you know/liked/loved/hated these books, and don't forget to be awesome and read a lot!

Stars are pretty incredible.

Oh, wow, it's Friday again already? (Not that I have any kind of dibs on Friday, it's just that my last 3 posts have been on a Friday and you don't mess with a combo.) Since we had nothing planned, I thought I'd try to properly nail down this thought I had tonight when I glanced up at the sky. I'm not sure I'm going to articulate it too well though, so bear with me.

To quote Douglas Adams, 'Space is big.' Like, distances too massive for us to even comprehend, distances so huge that the fastest thing in the universe takes millennia to cross the distances between them. Heck, even inside our solar system light takes hours to reach Pluto*. And, by comparison, the biological machinery that makes up my retina is actually and literally microscopic.

But I can still see stars. And that is terrifying.

We always think of stars as being nice twinkly things, or maybe vaguely as 'like the sun, so kinda hot and bright'. But the amount of energy that these things put out is so inconceivably massive that even across trillions of trillions of kilometres, our eyes, which are composed of just a handful of microscopic light-sensitive cells, our eyes which sometimes have serious problems reading a street sign at more than a few metres, can still see them.

I'll admit, that blew my mind a little bit.

*Pluto, or the Pluto-Charon binary system since its moon is almost the same size, should totally still be a planet, and I'm definitely not just saying that cause it messes up what I learned as a kid and just sounds wrong.