When I was a kid, I remember going to a book store with my Mom and asking for a recommendation from the clerk there for something in the fantasy genre. He kindly pointed me to the Dark Elf trilogy by R. A. Salvatore. I noticed that it had a Forgotten Realms logo on the cover, and when I went back to the store I noticed other books with that logo as well. That was my introduction to a setting that is shared between authors who can write stories in the same universe.

On the smaller end, there are settings where 2 (or a few) authors collaborate (like the Malazan universe), while on the larger side of things you have settings with dozens to potentially hundreds of authors (like Warhammer 40k, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc).

Some quick questions I thought of that might be interesting below, but please feel free to share anything you'd like about this topic!

• What was the first shared setting you read books in?
• Do you have a favorite shared literary setting?
• Do you mind the varying quality of the books in shared settings?
• Do you find yourself more likely to read a book in this shared setting compared to a book outside the setting?
• Are there any books in that setting that you don't recommend people read?

This is the nineteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum. We will be discussing We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor at the end of November.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

At some unspecified date in the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. As the remnants of the Moon begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that the number of collisions will increase exponentially. A large number of moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a "white sky" and blanketing the earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides; this will cause the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and oceans to boil away, destroying the biosphere and rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. It is decided to evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a "Cloud Ark" in orbit, including a "swarm" of "arklet" habitats that will be able to avoid the debris from the moon—both to attempt to preserve the human race and to give the remaining doomed inhabitants of Earth something to hope for, to prevent civil disorder from breaking out on Earth before its surface is destroyed. Each nation on Earth is invited to choose by lot a small number of young people to become eligible to join the Cloud Ark.

The Cloud Ark is to be based around the International Space Station (ISS), currently commanded by American astronaut Ivy Xiao. The ISS is already bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against moon debris. Robots are used to excavate Amalthea to provide more protection in a project run by mining and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie. Technicians and specialists, including Doc Dubois, are sent to the ISS in advance of the Hard Rain to prepare it to become the headquarters of the Cloud Ark.

The plan is that the Cloud Ark must be self-sufficient for 5,000 years and capable of repopulating Earth once it is habitable again. A Human Genetic Archive is sent to the Cloud Ark, with the intention that it will be used to rebuild the human population. Approximately 1,500 people are launched into space in the two years before the Hard Rain begins.

Suspecting that some architects of the Cloud Ark are interested only in pacifying Earth's inhabitants with false hope (rather than creating an environment that will actually survive in the long term), a billionaire named Sean Probst realizes that the Cloud Ark will need a ready supply of water in order to provide propellant for the space station and to prevent it from eventually falling into the earth's atmosphere. He embarks on a two-year expedition to extract ice from a comet nicknamed Greg's Skeleton, using a nuclear reactor to provide power to bring it back towards Earth.

The Hard Rain begins approximately two years after the destruction of the moon as predicted; human civilization as well as nearly all life on Earth is obliterated, although some try to take shelter underground (such as Dinah's father) or in the deep ocean (such as Ivy's fiancé). Markus Leuker, appointed leader of the Cloud Ark, declares all nations of Earth to be dissolved, and imposes martial law under the Cloud Ark Constitution. Despite a worldwide agreement that members of government will not be launched into space, the President of the United States, Julia Bliss Flaherty, manages to get herself sent to the Cloud Ark at the last minute. Shortly afterwards the main cache of the physical Human Genetic Archive attached to the ISS is ruined by the thrusters of an arklet passing too closely, leaving only samples that had been distributed amongst the arks.

There is disagreement on the Cloud Ark about the best way to organize its society and avoid the debris of the moon. Some "Arkies" favor converting the Cloud Ark into a decentralized swarm of small space vessels at a higher orbit out of range of debris, rather than maintaining the central authority of the ISS. Doc Dubois wants to shelter in the "Cleft", a crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the moon. Others want to go to Mars. Julia Flaherty starts to acquire a coterie of followers and encourages the proponents of the decentralized swarm plan.

Sean Probst's expedition has succeeded, and he has brought a comet into an orbit that will soon pass by Earth. His radio has failed and he has built a replacement by hand, and is able to communicate with Dinah MacQuarie by Morse code. However, he and his party die of radiation sickness caused by fallout from their nuclear reactor long before the expedition is complete. Markus Leuker and Dinah travel to the comet with a small crew to take control of it and bring it back to the Cloud Ark, in order to provide sufficient propellant to reach the Cleft on the moon's core. Just before Dinah returns with the ice as the sole survivor of the mission, Julia Flaherty persuades the majority of the population to abandon the ISS and move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, and sends a preliminary expedition to Mars. In the course of their sudden, unauthorized departure the ISS sustains catastrophic damage to many sections. The surviving portions of the Human Genetic Archive are carried along with them, but due to the Arkies' ignorance, these surviving portions are discarded or ignored. Only the digital version of the Human Genetic Archive survives aboard the ISS. The ISS and remaining third of the cloud ark combine through reshaping the ice into a support structure, and is rechristened Endurance.

During the three years that it takes for Endurance to reach the Cleft, the majority of its population die of various causes (cancer caused by cosmic radiation, suicide, bolide strikes, etc.); by the time they are within range of the Cleft, only about 30 survivors remain. Julia Bliss Flaherty's Swarm splits into two factions, who fight; Flaherty's faction is defeated. Running out of food, the Swarm resorts to cannibalism, and by the end of three years only 11 survive, including Flaherty and the leader of the opposing faction, Aïda. Aïda requests to reunite the remnant of the Swarm with the Cloud Ark before it reaches the Cleft, but secretly plans a battle for control of Endurance; as a result of that battle the population is diminished even further.

By the time Endurance reaches the relative safety of the Cleft, there are only eight surviving Homo sapiens in space, all of whom are women. One, the sociologist Luisa, has reached menopause, and the remaining seven (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) come to be known as the Seven Eves. The Human Genetic Archive has been destroyed, but they have sufficient resources to use the surviving genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the Seven Eves gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced. Aïda predicts that, hundreds of years from now, this project shall result in seven new races.

The narrative jumps to 5,000 years later. There are now three billion humans living in a ring around the Earth, and they have indeed formed into seven races, each one descended from and named after the Seven Eves who survived the events of Part 2. These races have quite distinct characteristics, including "Moirans" who can undergo "epigenetic shifts", radically changing their bodies in response to new environments. The iron core of the moon has mostly been used to build space habitats, but the Cleft itself has been turned into "Cradle", an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth.

Humanity has divided mostly along racial lines into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a form of Cold War characterized by cultural isolation, espionage and border skirmishes, mediated by treaty agreements more honored in the breach than the observance.

The orbiting races, the Spacers, terraform Earth by crashing ice comets into it to replenish the oceans, and seed the planet with genetically created organisms based upon re-sequenced DNA data saved from the escape to orbit. Once a breathable atmosphere is recreated, and sufficient plant and animal species have been reseeded, some members of the orbiting races ("Sooners") resettle the planet, in violation of treaty agreements.

A "Seven", a group of seven people with one member from each race, is recruited by "Doc" Hu Noah, to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. As the story unfolds, they discover that some humans did indeed survive the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines ("Diggers"), while others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"). Although these survivors have also evolved socially and biologically to form two additional races, the survival of root stock humanity separate from the Seven Eves causes turmoil in Spacer high politics. Ground conflict eventually occurs because each of the orbiting camps (Red and Blue) wishes to establish a preferential or exclusive relationship with the Earthbound races: the Diggers, although descendants of Dinah's family, interpret the Blue state's presence on their territory as an act of aggression and develop an alliance with Red, prompting Blue to seek out an alliance with the Pingers on the strength of Ivy's connection with one of their founders. Matters are further complicated because the Diggers claim all of the Earth's land surface as their own, and initially hold the Spacers in disdain (despite their high technology) for having fled the planet eons ago.

In an epilogue it is revealed that a separate, secret underwater ark had been created concurrently with the cloud ark, leading to the development of the Pingers, based on analysis of the "selfies" Ivy's fiance had sent her, using diagrams and sketches in the background as clues. Ty invites the surviving Seven (along with Sonar and Deep, representatives of the Diggers and the Pingers, respectively) back to apartments at his bar in the Cleft with the intent of forming the first "Nine".

Here is my goodreads, I accept every friend request I get, add me! I like seeing reviews from people who hang out in similar places as I do pinned above general user reviews. Warning, if you don't have many friends on there I will flood your activity feed (but hopefully this thread changes that anyway)

Inspired by this post

Hello fellow readers! I am finally close to finishing the book I am reading (maybe 2 weeks away or so - I am kind of a slow reader). That book is 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. However, I am already getting excited about the next book and I have a few on my "to read" list. I have read nothing by any of these authors, so I am going in blind, based only on some browsing and very basic non-spoiler reviews. Please, no spoilers. I thought it might be fun to post this here and see if your thoughts can help me prioritize my "to read" list and pick the next book I'll read. I think I am leaning towards "The Tunnel" or "The Seventh Function of Language", but anything on the list will be very fresh to me.

I started using the Goodreads annual reading challenge years ago. I generally treat it as an arbitrary target to see if I can read that many books in a year. I have found myself in recent years enjoying hitting that goal, and have found myself slotting in more shorter books in my reading between larger stories that I'm reading to help me reach that goal. This has in turn helped motivate me to dive in to some older sci-fi and fantasy works, which are usually shorter or standalone.

If I'm a couple of books off the goal I set at the end of the year I don't mind, but it is interesting looking back over the last few years seeing how this goal has shaped how I read since I've needed to adjust my reading habits to maintain a similar number of books now that I have kids.

I thought it would be fun to see how other Tilders approach this, if at all:

• Do you participate in any reading challenges, and if you do, which one(s)?
• Have you found the reading challenge changing how you read, or which books you read?

Our discussion at the end of October will cover The Poisoners Handbook. Are you making progress?

I found this nonfiction discussion of the New York City coroners office and the early days of effective forensic toxicology to be a real page turner. I started on the first and I finished it last week. I'm looking forward to our discussion, later this month.

This is the eighteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. We will be discussing The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum at the end of October.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Here is the schedule for the upcoming year

Last week in August - Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut,

Last week in September - Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Last week in October - The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum,

Last week in November - We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor,

December break for the holidays.

Last week in January - Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bissen,

Last week in February - The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Last week in March - The Metamorphosis by Kafka,

Last week in April - The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See,

Last week in May - Pnin by Nabokov,

Last week in June - How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler,

Last week in July - A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers,

Last week in August - Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Last week in September - Dr. No by Ian Fleming

This is the seventeenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Our next book will be Stories of Your Life and Others at the end of September.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Tonight at 7 pm Central/8 pm Eastern, there is a free workshop/training to help people learn how to make book résumés for highly targeted books. These would then go on the Unite Against Book Bans website.

Quote from the UABB website on what a Book Resume is:

Book Résumés help teachers, librarians, parents, and community members defend books from censorship. They detail each title’s significance and educational value and are easy to share with administrators, book review committees, elected officials, and board members.

Their goal is to create a process for sourcing these résumés from the community because the ALA cannot keep up with demand (and is drowning with budget cuts).

The registration link for the training is here:
https://givebutter.com/R0SVw9

I'm looking for some recommendations. I'm not a voracious reader, so just about anything you can recommend will be new to me.

I'm not sure how to describe the genre I'm after, which is really why I'm here. I just got done binging Petscop on YouTube; the surreal and Lynchian story telling coupled with the dark subject matter really sucked me in. I'm also somewhat enthralled by some of the higher quality Backrooms content.

I'm interested in short stories or novels.

Edit: sorry for not tagging. I completely forgot!

Cas' Short Slices were a series of reviews for my favorite short stories, previously posted on reddit. Each comes paired with a full length novel or novella that comes stylistically or thematically close. These are #1 to #5 (by date of posting, not ranking!).

• Selkie Stories Are For Losers, by Sofia Samatar

There are stories to read and forget. There are stories that linger in my head long after, shouting to be remembered. Then there are stories that haunt me like a ghost, that don’t need to shout for me to never let them go.

Selkie Stories… draws you into the heartbreak of a teenage girl lost in the mysteries of her broken home and the stories she tells herself to make sense of it all. It carves a window into her burgeoning relationship with her co-worker Mona and her own darknesses. In the narrator, Sofia writes pain and hope and grief and the reckless desperation only young love can bring.

Even for a short story this piece is brief, spanning a mere three thousand words. But those words pack a hell of a punch, enough to leave me breathless – and that’s a magic of its own.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out How To Be Both by Ali Smith, a Man Booker-nominated novel with similar themes running throughout, gorgeous prose and characters that’ll make you cry.

• Love Is Never Still, by Rachel Swirsky

Sometimes when you chase after something, you find in the end that what you’ve been looking for only exists in the figment of your imagination. Inside your head, the object takes on a life of its own until it diverges from real life. It’s always painful to realize what you wanted all along was never really there in the first place.

Rachel Swirsky takes the classic story of Galatea and Pygmalion and casts all players under scrutiny. Not just the artist and his sculptor but behind them, the affairs of Aphrodite who gave life to a statue and her contentious relations with the remaining Greek pantheon. It’s a love story, but also more than that. This story explores how nature shapes who we are, the many faces of desire and how it can change into something darker, something unpleasant.

I tend to wax over good prose but it’s such a hard quality to define, let alone master, that I have to give it mention here. The descriptions are vivid and strong, each scene painted clear without falling into the pitfall of purple prose. And these words aren’t window dressing – the author knows what she wants to say and how to say it. This story is a long one – more novelette than short story – but definitely well-worth the read.

Read it yourself here at Uncanny Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out Glimpses by Lewis Shiner.

This is a book I really love, and it’s all but unknown in these parts. Ray works as a radio repairman in 90s’ Texas, who finds one day an album by The Doors appearing in his workshop. Only thing is, the album’s never been recorded and released. Over time, Ray learns to walk down alternate timelines into the past – where he has the possibility to change things and make a difference.

Lewis tackles difficult themes such as the obligations of someone trapped in a loveless marriage, alcoholism and the struggle not to project your needs onto others. What’s more, he does them justice.
On surface level, these two are nothing alike but the parallels are there in the characters of Ray and Pygmalion, both of them are looking for something more without knowing what it is they really want.

Want something closer to Love Is… in theme? Try Galatea, by Emily Blunt. A different take on the story, presented in the unusual form of interaction fiction. It’s well-written and considered to be one of the best in it’s genre. Available online here.

• The Dancer On The Stairs, by Sarah Tolmie

There's been a lot of clamour recently for stories that aren't entrenched in darkness and grit. We're all tired of seeing depressing things in social media, in the news. Sometimes all you want is to see a ray of light shining at the end.

Enter The Dancer... where a young woman finds herself awakening on an empty flight of stairs, stretching forever in both directions. She's thrust into another world with no preparation, not even sharing a common language with the people there. Without crichtén - the coin of the stairway - she has no way past the guards stationed on each floor. And crichtén isn't something that can be bargained for. So she wanders on, lost and hungry and desperate to learn and navigate a culture entirely alien from her own.

Why I love The Dancer... is that ultimately, it's a story about kindnesses. From the guard sympathizing with her plight to the old pilgrim sharing his knowledge of the world with someone hapless as a newborn, it tells you that while the world may be cold, it isn't cruel. There are people out there who are willing to reach out to those in want, and to extend a hand into the dark.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Much lauded by /r/fantasy, this book contains much the same warm tones and hope carried by The Dancer... If you haven't checked it out yet, I'm adding my voice to the chorus telling you to do so now!

• Fox Magic, by Kij Johnson

Throughout mythologies there are countless variations of the story of the changeling wife. Selkies, huldras and crane wives play on the theme of captive spirits lured into the world of men by force or trickery.

In Fox Magic, Kij Johnson allows us a glimpse of the inverse through the eyes of a kitsune, or fox maiden. The unnamed narrator grows infatuated with the master of the property on which she and her family resides. The man is married with a wife and son. She is a fox, she does not care. And in this way the story delves into the quiet horror of seeing a person trapped in a waking dream, in what another thinks is love.

The nature of magic is that it's often cruel, giving power to one and not another - easy enough to parallel in the real world. So we have to not just look but see, and realize when it's past time to let things go.

Read it yourself here at Kij Johnson's website.

Hungry for more? Check out The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld by Patricia McKillip. Though she writes with a lighter touch than Kij, Forgotten Beasts... is very much in line with the themes in this short story - how strongly magic tempts when it promises to give you your heart's desire, how affection needs to be a two-way street.

• Second Person, Present Tense by Daryl Gregory

Nobody can choose the circumstances of their own birth, and some people come into being in more unusual ways than others. Most of us create an identity for ourselves through the passing of time and gathered experience. For Terry, it's nowhere near that simple.

The moment Terry comes into existence her parents are waiting to claim her, parents she doesn't remember. The doctor informs her that the drug Zen is responsible for stripping away her knowledge of who she was. Whoever inhabited her body before the overdose, she's gone now and left Terry there in her place. And already she's started to form memories of her own, disparate from the expectations of the people calling her their daughter and wanting her back again.

Second Person... is centered around the themes of self-actualization despite the expectations of those around you. Whoever you were is unimportant, what matters is who you are in the now and in the end, it's up to you to make your identity.

Read it yourself here at Clarkesword Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker. Chava, the titular golem, comes to life during a voyage to a promised future in New York. But the one who's commissioned her dies in an unexpected manner, she's left unmoored to find her own way in a strange new city.

So I have a have maybe a few hundred books at home and I think it's time I put together a collection of what I have. I'd love a database of author / title / publication year / physical location that I could search through ideally.

Is there software that can help with this? I had a brief look at LibraryThing, but I think it costs money for the quantity of books I'm looking at. I briefly toyed with the concept of making my own app that could scan an ISBN to speed up the process (since most will have ISBNs). I wonder what the people of Tildes suggest? Has anyone here done something similar?

So I know we have the biweekly "what are you reading" thread, but sometimes a book will stick with you for a while beyond reading it. I'm curious what those sticky books might be for those who would like to share. Feel free to include an honorable mention if you wish!

For example, I finished reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones pretty recently, and I have a feeling it's going to stick with me for a while. It has a particularly unique flavor of an often-seen paranormal/mythological creature that I appreciated, and the characters developed so much over time that I find myself thinking about it. This book wasn't at all like what I normally read (though I am trying to branch out) and I benefitted from the reading experience more than I expected to. The blurb I got for the book also tells you nothing about the story - it's basically just the hook - and I think that technique worked very well. Interestingly, most of the books I find myself thinking about for a while after I read them are horror books, but I'm not usually thinking about them for their scarier elements.

Honorable mention - Sand by Hugh Howey. I read this a year ago and often find myself recommending it to people who enjoy sci fi. I found the technology (decrepit though it is shown to be) super interesting.

Other books that are feeling memorable for me right now are part of series I'm actively working toward finishing, so I'm not really counting those, as they're called up by their universes every time I dive back in.

In light of the stated desire of group members to also read books reflecting minority or disadvantaged perspectives, here is a second book nominations thread.

I'm drawing the boundaries of the category as broadly as I can and feel free to include a book (within the length limit of 600 pages) that you think fits within these parameters. Also, diverse or minority or disadvantaged can apply to either or both of author or main character. Of the books of this type we have read so far, Born a Crime and Kindred were the most popular.

Here are some examples of what we might choose. This is not meant to be a set of hard boundaries, just a descriptive exploration.

Books that qualify include but are not limited to: being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, tibetan, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

Edit - Nominations are closed

This is the fourth nominations thread for Tildes book club.

If you think you might be interested to read with us, please name between one and five books you find intriguing and think others might enjoy. We will later have a voting thread so that each nomination gets an equal shot to win votes with no early nomination advantage. Our next book in August is Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Followed by Ted Chiang Stories of your life and Others in September.

Please feel free to nominate both fiction and nonfiction. Books should be 600 pages or shorter. The first books in series are fair game for nominations if they tell a complete story.