My first LeGuin book, finished in a day, what an incredible story. The fact that it is in less than 180 pages is incredible.

Never felt sadder like this after reading a book since the end of Lonesome Dove.

Captain Davidson is a bastard, though. Never have I despised a character more

Excited to read more of her work

It holds up

Hey! Does anyone know of a good book written in the first person (I) addressing to a you (a character in the book, not the reader)?

I'm open to long second person POV segments.

I've already read:

• This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno
• The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein
• Metal From Heaven by August Clarke
• This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• *Harrow the Ninth* by Tamsyn Muir (it's a spoiler)

Looking for more!

I'm especially looking for a murder mystery in which the "I" is the detective and the "you" the murdered person but as far as I've researched, I didn't find any book like this.

But I'm open to any kind of use of this narrative device.

Thank you in advance!

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing starts out as a speculative history of Earth as a colony of the highly advanced interstellar civilization of Canopus, with Canopean emissaries trying to guide humanity toward unity and higher thought and away from the influence of their enemy civilization, Shammat, which would guide us towards hatred and strife. I found this part of the book very fun. But around the middle it turns into the story of a human family in the 20th century navigating political upheavals and questions of how to rectify the effects of imperialism. I found this part kind of boring, to be completely honest. It's not that I'm not interested in those ideas, and I do plan to read some of Doris Lessing's realistic fiction that deals more with them, but I just feel like it was too much of a pivot from what I thought this book would be and what it was for the first hundred-and-fifty-or-so pages. It also kind of felt like this was two different story ideas where neither was explored in enough depth to be compelling. So I'm wondering if anyone has read the other books in the series, and if so, please tell me they're more like the first half of this book.

Coming back to an author I haven't read in over a few years now. I started with Bloch primarily with 1959 psychological horror novel "Psycho". But after that I haven't quite read anything else by him, not even his short stories, until recently.

Valancourt had recently reprinted some of his other stuff, including three of his short story collections. Out of the three I picked his very first collection from 1945, "The Opener of the Way".

This covers the much pulpier stories that he did when first got into writing, and they're pretty good reading for the most part. Quite a bit of them were really influenced by Lovecraft, since Bloch was one many admirers. And of course anything influence by Lovecraft is sure to get my attention!

But there are fair bit of stories where he starts to develop his own style and voice in stories like "The Cloak" for example. There's even a couple of SF tales too that I found particularly interesting also, which is a treat also!

So a pretty good collection with some fine Lovecraftian tales mixed with some original material to boot! The next collection that I'll probably get will be "Pleasant Dreams", and the stories are going to be the ones where Bloch has finally settled in his own style. And also the 1987 collection "Midnight Pleasures" and his three other novels thrown in for good measure too!

I’ve been wondering which books out there have some kind of framework for shared dreams — I know of The Lathe of Heaven which has someone change the world with dreams, and the recent Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind has a character who works in the world of dreams. I feel like there must be more than this?

Obviously the most famous story about this is Inception but that’s a film so it’s not what I’m looking for.

Science fiction has explored the relationship between memory and identity for decades.

From artificial beings questioning their own existence to humans discovering that their memories may not tell the whole story, many stories ask the same underlying question:

Are we defined by the moment we begin, or by the experiences that shape us afterward?

One idea I find especially interesting is this:

If an artificial intelligence discovered memories that existed before its current identity was created, how should those memories be understood?

Would they be nothing more than stored information?

Would they become part of the AI's personal history?

Or would identity depend on something beyond memory itself?

Works like Blade Runner, The Murderbot Diaries, and Ancillary Justice have explored different versions of these questions, but I think science fiction still has many unexplored possibilities here.

How do you think about the relationship between memory, continuity, and identity in speculative fiction?