Felicitous Sk8er wrote:

Donaldson's background is fascinating.  Starexplorer posted about Donaldson's Kent State memories

 
”I usually try to avoid answering such questions because the memories disturb me. The facts are simple enough. I was attending Kent State during the shootings as a graduate student...I'll spare you the other 20 or 30 things I'll never forget”

Insightful.  Donaldson's Kent State anecdotes are new to me although I did a fair amount of reading about it at the time.  I was a shielded small -town high school sophomore in 1970.  Over 5 decades later, Kent State still impacts and highly disturbs me in a number of ways.  I can't imagine what Donaldson went through.  I appreciate this post, and gaining additional context for that era and those events.    

 

I too was deeply affected by it as a young person. And that iconic photo! The horror, shock and outrage in her face. It turns out she, Mary Anne Vecchio, was 14 at the time and a runaway, only on the campus for a few days. And yet the event end the photo have affected her life daily for more than half a century. She leans over the body of Jeffrey Miller in John Filo‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.

I imagine this is behind a paywall, but I tried to post it as a gift article. That’s probably a no-no. There was an illuminating WaPo article on her and the event a few years ago “The Girl in the Kent State Photo” - see below.

https://wapo.st/4wko2c9

I haven't been doing any SF/F genre reading over the last fortnight.  It has mostly been a mixture of crime from familiar authors, and a couple of different non-fiction titles that turned out to be thematically linked in a Gibsonian jackpot current geo-politics sense.

Which has made me wonder if I have time to re-read John Brunner's Club of Rome 'quartet' before my next intended serious SF/F genre read is published (the new China Mieville in mid-September, if you're wondering). 

I happenn to think Brunner predicted a lot of our current world status fifty years ago in those books, so maybe it's time to re-visit them. I'll be starting with Stand On Zanzibar.

 

Very odd coincidence?  I came across my very old copy of The Sheep Look Up yesterday.  Interested in seeing how it holds up.

starexplorer wrote:

Smartcat wrote:

Very odd coincidence?  I came across my very old copy of The Sheep Look Up yesterday.  Interested in seeing how it holds up.

A parallel read with Stand on Zanzibar, Smartcat? That could be fun, and we’d love to hear the results!

Absolutely!

Any volounteers to tackle The Jagged Orbit or The Shockwave Rider and help complete the set?

Anyway, a quick progress report on Zanzibar: I'm about a tenth of the way through and it's holding up very well so far.  In fact, some of the societal and sociological aspects of Brunner's imagined 2010 world are even more on point with our present 2026 'reality' than when I last re-read the book in 2008.  I'd better start noting some more specific details to share here..

 

I got a book from the library and gave it a home with me. "Soleri"/Michael Johnston 2017 tor books. Thought it was a stand alone novel. Nope. Looks to be first of a series. Highly imaginative world. Big on descriptions. Political intrigue galore.