![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feed
It’s both in the Top 20 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2025, and in the general Top 100 Books of the Year as well. Well, cool! I will take that, thank you.
— JS
disneydream06
disneydream06twd_princess.
ndrosenhalfshellvenuswordsmithdaily_feedmerriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 13, 2025 is:
peremptory • \puh-REMP-tuh-ree\ • adjective
Peremptory is a formal word used especially in legal contexts to describe an order, command, etc., that requires immediate compliance with no opportunity to show why one should not comply. It is also used disapprovingly to describe someone with an arrogant attitude, or something indicative of such an attitude.
// The soldiers were given a peremptory order to abandon the mission.
// The company’s president tends to adopt a peremptory manner especially at the negotiating table.
Examples:
“Cook had changed. He seemed restless and preoccupied. There was a peremptory tone, a raw edge in some of his dealings. Perhaps he had started to believe his own celebrity. Or perhaps, showing his age and the long toll of so many rough miles at sea, he had become less tolerant of the hardships and drudgeries of transoceanic sailing.” — Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, 2024
Did you know?
Peremptory comes from the Latin verb perimere, meaning “to take entirely” or “to destroy,” which in turn combines the prefix per- (“throughout” or “thoroughly”) and the verb emere (“to take”). Peremptory implies the removal of one’s option to disagree or contest something, and sometimes suggests an abrupt dictatorial manner combined with an unwillingness to tolerate disobedience or dissent, as in “employees given a peremptory dismissal.” Not to sound peremptory ourselves, but don’t confuse peremptory with the similar-sounding (and related) adjective preemptive, meaning “marked by the seizing of the initiative,” as in “a preemptive attack.”
ysabetwordsmith
white_asterI totally fell off the wagon with these. I have been reading, just...keep missing Wednesday somehow. (I had to think really hard about whether it was Wednesday again). Also I've been reading a lot of books that I just wasn't excited about (and some I DNFed or kind of wish I'd DNFed.) But I am brought back by the need to talk about this awesome book I read:
Finder by Suzanne Palmer
Palmer also wrote The Secret Life of Bots, which I loved. This Finder series I originally passed over because I thought "a space repo man named Fergus Ferguson tries to steal back a spaceship in an old mining colony made of hollowed-out asteroids and various large tin cans" was going to be more absurd than I usually enjoy. Oh boy, I could NOT have been more wrong. 5-star book, A+ characterization and wonderful worldbuilding, totally.
The more I thought about what was working in this book, the more I was really, really impressed with how (despite Fergus' terrible name) this book took its characters so seriously. Like...ALL the characters, from Fergus to the side characters to random folks Fergus met for a page or less. Everyone had understandable goals and motivations which changed realistically as the plot unfolded and they reacted to events as much as Fergus did. This led to very wonderfully ALIVE-feeling settings. The asteroid colony and Mars both felt filled with peoples' hopes and dreams and tragedies. Somehow this author made the politics of this collection of asteroids and tin cans feel messy and realistic and interesting.
I was also super impressed by how this author dealt with the really rather high amount of randomness in the plot. Fergus is a thief. He's doing a heist, scheming some schemes, and things go ass-up fairly early on. He's realistically forced many, many times to make a bad plan, just because it'll make SOMETHING change and then he can reassess. This could very easily have felt capricious and slapstick and unearned (a pet peeve of mine in some books), but it did NOT, because of the wonderful CHARACTERIZATION. Fergus spent the whole book understandably stressed about everything, convinced that he was going to get himself and everyone he cared about killed. He felt the GRAVITY of all this unplanned chaos, and passed that tension on to the reader, while moving forward anyway in the smartest way he could come up with (and he is SMART! It's a whole plot point that he several times amazes people with his knowledge because the first thing he does is READ THE ENTIRETY OF THE ASTEROID INTERNET so he knows what's what. A protagonist! Actually looking shit up rather than winging it! <3 <3!) Yes, he was lucky, and yes, he had some help from many quarters, but it somehow all made sense and held together without feeling random.
Also, the science felt like it held. There was a lot of dealing with zero- and low-G and crawling around on the outside of asteroids and habitats, and it felt realistic without being overwhelming. Which was just icing on the great characterization and smart-plot cake.
Also there was no extraneous romance, which is also a plus for me.
I immediately needed to track down everything in this series, after reading this.
A++, do recommend.
lovelyangel Strolling Pond Garden • Portland Japanese Garden • Portland, Oregon October 30, 2025 Nikon Z8 • NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S f/8 @ 33mm • 1/500s • ISO 1600 |
ysabetwordsmith moonhare
ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
computerworld. beavertech has been commissioning poems to be posted in The Freaks Club family of communities. ysabetwordsmith ranunculusysabetwordsmith scalziwhatever_feed
Information is the name of the game, and today’s Big Idea has a lot of it! From quantum mechanics to Diet Coke, author Stewart Hotston takes you on a ride through how the galaxy works, and how his new novel, Project Hanuman, came to be.
STEWART HOTSTON:
My fate was sealed in Leicester Square, London when I was six years old and I was taken to see Return of the Jedi. That was the day I fell in love with Space Opera.
From then on, I was a big fan – going so far as to get my PhD in theoretical physics, before ditching academia for ‘a real job’ as my grandmother declared. Over the years I’ve learned to keep my opinions about science fiction to myself – not least because I realise that pointing at a movie in outrage and screaming ‘that’s not how angular momentum works!’ is fun for exactly no one including me. It really isn’t how angular momentum works though.
Instead I’m going to enjoy the story, accept the nonsense for dramatic licence and try not to remind anyone that we’re unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
Honestly, most of the time I’m happy someone made some science fiction at all.
Many of us have some idea of just how weird it would be to be close to a blackhole, and we know that travelling near the speed of light does odd things to our experience of time.
But beyond that, the universe is far weirder than our wildest tropes. There could be moons made of diamond, there could be planets with atmospheres so dense that if there was life inside them it would exist the same way that animals at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans do – via derivative energy sources rather than directly harvesting their local sun’s energy.
One of the big ideas I’ve been fascinated by for a long time now is the role of information in mathematics and, more generally, the universe itself. We tend to think of information as something we collate, gather and record. Except it’s entirely possible that information is the foundation stone of the entire edifice that is reality – that information is Real with a capital R. There’s an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics called Quantum Information Theory (QIT for short) whose entire thesis can be catchily summed up as the ‘Bit before It’.
What holds my ongoing fascination with QIT is how it suggests that every part of reality right down to the most fundamental components are, actually, bits of information. This might sound very esoteric (and, sure, it is) but some of the biggest problems in physics today focus on the nature of information and how that reflects reality.
When I say information I don’t mean how much my six pack of caffeine free Diet Coke costs nor even what the words caffeine free Diet Coke signify. If it’s not that then what do we mean when we talk about information?
When we talk about information in this cosmic context we talk about information as the thing which defines the very nature of reality. Consider a photon: the photon’s state (you could say the very nature of what it is) is encoded into its wavefunction. A wavefunction here is a mathematical expression for the very nature of the photon – describing among other things, its energy, position, chirality and entanglement. You add those things up and you get the photon. It’s not that information comes from describing the photon, it’s that information makes the photon. The information comes first and, according to this way of seeing the universe, is a real thing (it is THE real thing). Information is more real than the stuff you can touch because it’s the reason you can touch stuff in the first place.
This could feel very philosophical, too much woo-wah to be practical or interesting except to a small coterie of mathematicians, philosophers and physicists. Yet the answer to what information is informs a myriad of real world technologies such as how small we can make computer chips and how fast they can go. It informs subjects such as how birds navigate and how whales detect magnetic fields, and how information is transmitted via mechanisms such as DNA. After all, information is everywhere; information is everything.
If you put your head in the clouds you could see a world in which you could change the information that makes a photon and turn it into something else. Imagine a civilisation that could manipulate the information that builds reality the way you can edit a story on a word processor.
When I came to write my own space opera after years of not knowing the story I wanted to tell, I realised that a central thing I wanted to achieve was to bring space opera into the present by reflecting some of the most cutting-edge physics. You could say the big idea was to answer this question: what would Iain Banks’ Culture look like if it was founded on what we know now about the universe?
Which sounds fine, if overly ambitious, until you think about what that means. It means building civilisations that might categorise themselves not by their access to energy (the famous Khardashev scale) but by how easily they can manipulate information. After all, if you could take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and change the information that makes them hydrogen and reprogram the universe to have them as gold…then the amount of energy you have access to becomes pretty irrelevant (as does gold). Indeed you’d look at those who were stuck with mundane matter as technological primitives.
It’s what Star Trek’s replicators are based on – matter/energy transformation through manipulation of information – after all, you have to know what the information is that expresses hot dogs if you want to turn raw energy into the best hot dog in the galaxy.
If it’s a minor point in Star Trek, for me it’s a major one – what could threaten a civilisation that can turn your laser beams into cotton candy? What would be their struggle if they can access the very fundamental nature of the universe at will?
The thing is science doesn’t explain everything – and here I’m quoting the most brilliant physicist I ever met, Prof Tom McLeish – it’s the art of being wrong constructively. There’s always more to know and, potentially, always someone else who knows it. I settled here – if human brains are limited in how we encounter the universe and hence how we manage to imagine it, all other types of being will also have this category of limitation – be they AI, life evolved from bacteria or giant sentient stars – our shapes will define our experience of the world.
Hence, even if the universe really is information as stuff, we are, all of us, made of that stuff. If we could tweak the world by editing the page we’d still be limited in our ambitions, our scope, by the fact we are beings living inside the system.
“Bit before It” might change the very way we build our society, but I’ve become convinced that the ‘It’, the people processing that information, remain at the heart of the story. And that’s the big idea.
Project Hanuman: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s
james_davis_nicoll - Testimony of Mute Things (Penric & Desdemona, volume 15) by Lois McMaster Bujoldscalziwhatever_feed - When the Moon Hits Your Eye an Amazon Best Book of 2025disneydream06 - (no subject)disneydream06 - (no subject)ndrosen - Real Estate Follieshalfshellvenus - Mid-November already!wordsmithdaily_feed - screedmerriamwebster_feed - peremptoryysabetwordsmith - Vocabulary: Carcinizationwhite_aster - What We Weading Wednesdaylovelyangel - Overcast Autumnysabetwordsmith - Half-Price Sale in Polychrome Heroicsmoonhare - Stuffysabetwordsmith - New Crowdfunding Project: "Monsterotica"ysabetwordsmith - Read "GAMING"ysabetwordsmith - Cyberspace Theoryranunculus - So farconuly - It's apparently been 50 yearsysabetwordsmith - Shoppingscalziwhatever_feed - The Big Idea: Stewart Hotstontimeasmymeasure
