Several users expressed interest in reading Roadside Picnic after I recommended it in another (now deleted) topic about the movie it inspired, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, which in turn inspired the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videogame series. So I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to create a Pop-up Book Club event about it to encourage others to join us in reading it, so that we can all discuss it afterwards.

My description of the book from a previous comment that enticed the others to read it:

The basic premise was really unique and interesting, too. Without giving too much away, it's a story of Alien "invasion" only when the Aliens visited Earth, instead of doing any of the standard scifi trope stuff, the event was basically like that of a Roadside Picnic to them. That is to say, they showed up, barely noticed the humans who were tantamount to ants to them, did whatever Alien travelers with incomprehensibly advanced technology do when taking a quick pitstop on another world, and left a bunch of trash behind when they left. The story is about "stalkers" that venture into the exceptionally dangerous wasteland left behind by the Aliens in order to recover their trash (also usually exceptionally dangerous, but also exceptionally powerful) in order to sell it on the black market.

IMO, it's a very good classic scifi novel, and also a relatively short one too (only 224 pages) which makes it ideal summer reading, and ideal for this sort of thing since it’s not a huge commitment. I think this could be fun, so if you feel like joining in, please feel free to. I will also be rereading the book to refresh my memory of it, and roughly a month from now I will make a follow-up topic so we can have the discussion.

The book is available on paperback at Amazon for $15, or on Kindle for $10, but your own local retailer or library might also have a copy. The Strugatsky brothers are both long dead though, so you can always pirate it relatively guilt free if you can't find it elsewhere.

p.s. If there is a decent level of interest, and this goes well, maybe we can even make this a regular thing. :)

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

Let me know if you're interested by leaving a comment and I will ping you when the Discussion topic gets posted.

Any fans of this series over here? I was planning a series reread before book 5 comes out. It was going to be hosted on the bobiverse subreddit, but... well, ya know.

If enough people want to do one here I'd be happy to host it, probably starting in about 4 weeks and doing one book every 2 weeks.

A Logic Named Joe is a 1946 Sci Fi short story that introduces concepts such as the internet, streaming music and streaming video, search engines with family friendly filters and artificial intelligence.

Link to story: http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm

So I'm reading Asimov's short-story anthology The Complete Robot, which contains stories written between 1939 and 1977, and I'm fascinated by several instances in which Asimov tries to predict the future of robotics.

When he gets it right is just as interesting as when he gets it wrong, as even when he's wrong, he's wrong in very interesting ways.

For example, it's very interesting how Asimov seems to think that everything must have a positronic brain (which often produces something either identical or very close consciousness), when in reality we now have numerous useful robots that have nothing of the sort.

So this made me thinking, I think I'd like to write a story that was just like that, an exploration of universal themes that is facilitated by simplified technology. A form of retrofuturism. And since I had the idea, obviously someone else had it before. I wanna read it! More recent stories, especially those with old-school robots and artificial intelligence. Any suggestions?

Also open to other medias, but books would be particularly helpful.

It seems incredibly common in works of science fiction that touch upon technological immortality to focus on every possible way that such a technology could go wrong, create problems, or worsen social dynamics.

Among the negative outcomes that have attained trope levels of frequency, off the top of my head, I can name the following:

1. Immortality becomes available only to the ultra-wealthy, allowing them even more power to abuse everyone else, leading immortal people to be antagonists in a pretty generic dystopian plot.

2. Immortality subtly twists the morality of its beneficiaries, causing them to lose sight of "the real meaning of life" according to the author's worldview, and the protagonist usually fights for society to recognize how important death and endings are

3. Immortality causes people to go insane, become monsters, or otherwise utterly lose their humanity (this is more of an extreme version of case #2, but I feel it's distinct in the way a story plays out)

4. Immortality ultimately leads to the extinction of the human species due either to biological effects of the immortality technology in question, or due to cultural/societal shifts that lead people to stop reproducing

I'm sure there are many others that I'd recall if prompted, but my point is that I don't think I can name any science fiction that involves immortality technology that doesn't also decry it as ultimately a harmful development.

Are there any works of science fiction that any of you can think of that do more to celebrate the idea or look forward to it with some optimism?

I can understand why the journey to make this into a film is so convoluted. I'm not sure I've ever read anything so dense and epic. I was always sort of keen to the series, and always thought the worm god was just cool imagery. So I did have kind of an internal motivation to get this far, but now that I'm about to dive into God Emperor, I just feel bad for anyone that called it quits after the first book. Frank Herbert had a lot to say, and faithfully adapting this to any kind of screen, I think, is impossible.

I just finished binging The Habitat, the awesome podcast about NASA's simulated mission to Mars. And I'm feeling the urge to read something along those lines: fiction or true stories and indulge my fascination with space (and things coming from it) and how that relates to contemporary imagination.

Any suggestions?

I've just finished The Sirens of Titan from 1959 (after seeing it recommended here, actually) and something struck me compared to more recent books. A lot of the more technical stuff is kind of hand-waved away. It's not a criticism, just something that stuck out as I was reading. Is this a trend? Do readers demand more details these days? I've read a bunch of sci fi from the 60s until the present day, but I've only really gotten back into it more recently with Sirens.

Perhaps I've read too much Neal Stephenson, who has likely never hand-waved anything away! The Martian also springs to mind, but that's very deliberately focused on the details and keeping it realistic, IIRC.