[🏳️⚧️🏴🔻] LOCAL CARCASS 🍄 🍄 🍄 Riparian buffer restoration, please keep to the path.</...
as a speculative bio enjoyer, it did take me a bit to get in-tune with Semiosis . I kept distracting myself with questions about why an alien planet would have plants and animals very much within a reasonable Earthen frame (like the fippokats). I had to get over myself. The words (e.g. bamboo, lentil, tulip, eagles, slugs...) referred to aliens that were non-Earthen in nature, and they were not…
I crossed that damn road . I found a tunnel running underneath. I wonder if non-human animals use it...? across the road there are interesting observations on human influence I can make. firstly, there is a reservoir which seemed host to the highest population of breeding toads I'd seen in... not sure, in a long time. Saw two males trying to mount one female. One male was clinging to her underside…
I could summarise the previous two books in The Children of Time series. First one: intersecting narratives detailing the history of the sophont spiders, the Portiids, + the journey taken by humans to the Portiid planet, Kern's World. Second one: another joint narrative, Human-Portiid meeting with the Damascan octopi, and the interwoven histories of the planets Damascus and Nod. Third book...?…
the book is open access. JSTOR has it . I do love a hard copy for annotation purposes... I'd recommend this if you're looking for a very zoomed-out view of the struggle for food sovereignty (both the struggle itself, and the history of what it is struggling against) in a few places around the world. The book covers latin america, southern Africa (distinct from, but including, South Africa), China,…
not sure how many people were introduced to Tchaikovsky's work along the lines of: the first book is about sophont spiders, and the second one is about sophont octopi. You might wonder if the premise gets stale. the thing about these books is that there is so much more that explodes out of that single premise. Even while keeping the "collision course" formatting of the previous book (where the…
You might know the late Dr Schmidt: he's the guy who got stung by as many stinging insects as possible & created the Schmidt pain index . This is that guy. The Sting of the Wild weaves between an autobiography of an entomologist-chemist who gained pop-culture notoriety, and precise science pertaining to the stinging insects he loved. This feels right to read, the idea of Dr Schmidt, the pain…
with a kind of desperation I've started wandering off again. Helps the thoughts. (Not yet am I at the point of curling up gainst a moss hummock and not returning home till late. Delusions teeter but I do not need to flee.) In this state I talk to fellow life and I am learning its shapes and patterns. Much of the forest nearby is ex-lumber-plantation, therefore consists of quick growing Pinus…
I was audience to a discussion about a rewilding project. There was a PhD student who wanted to talk to the communities impacted by the project, as a part of her thesis. This PhD student was encouraged with something along the lines of: "...Very brave, they [members of the impacted communities] might say things you don't want to hear. " ...I'm sorry...??? there is the low-hanging fruit of: if the…
WE is one of the Original authoritarian Utopias, written in the 1920s, predating 1984 and Brave New World . The book is a short, masterful piece that did not go down very well with the Soviets. The main character, Δ-503 (in my translation) or D-503, serves as a narrator who has grown up generations-deep in the One State, a regime which tightly controls as much of human life as it can. society is…
a brilliantly thought-out piece ruminating on sentience in non-humanoid organisms. How would a creature with different senses and a different body plan organise their society? The pitch I was given was spoiler-free (it doesn't even scratch the surface of the actual goings-on of the book) so I'll paraphrase it here. Tchaikovsky describes a future humanity that seeks to create new humans out of…