A Beginner's Guide to Science Fiction/Fantasy

2015 was not a good year for me, book-wise. It turns out, gainful employment is actually is lot of work. Which, really, it shouldn't have been a surprise but it still, you know, sucks. A lot. Mostly because I still buy a lot of books, but don't actually get around to reading them. Like. Ever.

It's a problem.

Luckily, however, even when I'm not reading a lot, I'm still reading more per month than most people read in a year. Which, I mean, it fucks with my sleep cycle a lot, but that's- Who cares about that, is what I'm saying.

So.

This is how we're tackling this problem.

The books have been collected into little sets, starting with the absolutely vital, touching upon the most important, digressing into some of my personal favourites and meandering through a couple of handy collections for when you need a very specific kind of book.

idk it's kind of mess? i make up a lot of words here, mostly because i've been reading vikram seth again. (note: the Capital Letters i forget are because of e. e. cummings)

let me live, guys.

 

These lists are not afraid of recommending you books that are aimed at eight-year-olds, okay? There is Dr. Seuss here, and that is important.

The Bare Minimums:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
2. Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
3. Star Wars (Adapted Screenplay) by George Lucas
4. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
5. Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The Staple Reads:

1. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
2. A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin 
3. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

The Quirksome:

1. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
3. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
4. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
5. The Witches by Roald Dahl

The Dystopian Standard:

1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4. The Giver by Lois Lowry
5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishigiro

Personal Favourites:

1. The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate
2. A Wizard in Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
3. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
4. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
5. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
6. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
7. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
8. Toys by James Patterson

The Modern Classics:

1. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
2. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
3. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
5. The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Non-terrible books aimed at 16-year-olds (and below):

1. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick RIordan
2. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
3. Gone by Michael Grant
4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
5. The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Just read everything this author has written okay, ALL OF IT IS EXCELLENT:

1. Neil Gaiman, aka my entire religion
2. Rick Riordan
3. Stephen King
4. George Orwell
5. Roald Dahl

Enfin, the last list here, sorted with a weirdly obsessive sort of precision. The order here is how good the book has been so far, and how good I expect it to be. All these books are half-finished, and nearly all of them are scattered throughout my room in varying degrees of unreadness. Books are the full reason I'm broke, not even kidding.

What I'm saying is- the further down this list you go, the more exponentially the level of awesome of the book is. Ready Player One, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is Harry Potter, is like, a 14 right now.

Micro, on the other hand, is a negative 43.

So.

Here goes,

The Unfinished:

1. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
2. The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
3. The FIre Thief by Terry Deary
4. The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
5. The 5th Wave by Rick Yancy
6. Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
7. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
8. Screwed by Eoin Colfer
9. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
10. Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

A couple of disclaimers:

A lot of these books are parts of series, in which case I have simply mentioned the first part of the series. In several other cases, I am only partly through the book, but it is popular and old and fucking incredibly brilliant enough that I just chucked it in in the other lists.

Except ASOIAF. I haven't read ASOIAF. I don't plan to either. Sue me, you dickless Crows.

K, you're welcome. I have to go figure out how to (legally) watch Sherlock tonight.

The Only Alt/Pop/Indie/Rock Playlist You Need

Hello. Remember when I did lists? And then I deleted everything, and like forty different people yelled at me over the span of eight months? Ah yes, good times. Forty people who give a fuck. #blessed

EITHER WAYS I DID A LIST, which is the first list in a series of lists that will be released over the course of the last week of 2015, and a little bit of 2016.

The list is all albums, not individual songs, and all of them came out in 2015*, okay, and I honestly probably have forgotten more good music this year than anything. Here's the plus side - I only recommend the album if I like almost the entire album, so you get like more than 250 non-sucky songs in one click. If you feel like I skipped something really good though, feel free to leave angry comments.

*Because let's face it, if I hadn't limited myself someway, somehow, this list would go on for years.

In no particular order of awesome (primarily because everything here is awesome, and also, if this matters to you, everything here is available on UAE iTunes):

1. Badlands by Halsey
2. The Gift EP by Pia Mia
3. Communion by Years & Years
4. Beauty Behind the Madness by The Weeknd
5. Empire (Original Soundtrack from Season 1) by Empire Cast
6. Handwritten by Shawn Mendes
7. Four Pink Walls EP by Alessia Cara
8. Purpose by Justin Bieber
9. Beneath the Skin by Of Monsters and Men
10. Blue Neighbourhood by Troye Sivan
11. Aftermath by Hillsong UNITED
12. Run by AWOLNATION
13. xx by The xx
14. American Beauty/American Psycho by Fall Out Boy
15. Urban Flora EP by Galimatias
16. Blurryface by twenty one pilots
17. Different Colors EP by WALK THE MOON
18. Kindred by Passion Pit
19. Smoke and Mirrors (Deluxe) by Imagine Dragons
20. Nothing But Thieves by Nothing But Theives
21. Made in the A.M. by One Direction
22. Ex's and Oh's by Elle King
23. Saint Raymond by Young Blood
24. Desire Lines by Fictonian
25. Art Angels by Grimes
26. Wiped Out! by The Neighbourhood
27. Light Up the Dark by Gabrielle Aplin
28. Sounds Good Feels Good by 5 Seconds of Summer
29. Jarryd James EP by Jarryd James
30. Wilder Minds by Mumford & Sons

Note how I have not included Adele's album in this list. This is because Adele did not release her album on Spotify or Apple Music. I do not have time for that kind of drama, thank you and goodnight.

Of Gaiman and Chesterton

I've had the sort of day that is only splendid for my kind of people - the ones who hopelessly crave new words. New phrases. New people caught in paper-thin slices of life. And above all else, new stories. All the afternoon I've whiled away, with fresh cups of vanilla tea and caramel cappuccinos, working through a tottering stack of half-read novels, Daughter and John Mayer and The Paper Kites filling up the endless rustle of paper and caffeine-laced swirls of rising steam.

There are the guilty pleasures - paperback copies of Lee Child and Tom Clancy, with worn, cracked spines, purchased secondhand from a town over. The plot is rich, tight in its lack of verbosity. The hero is always a redeemable cynic, the villains are always truly evil, the American western is reinvented, while holding true to its clearly demarcated camps of black and white.

There is a treasured, just found copy of Fragile Things, its jacket retaining its new-book-sheen; the paper, clean, crisp, untouched by that sweet rotting scent of old books. Neil Gaiman writes short stories with featherlight touches; jade brilliant and incisive in his prose. The memory-scent of incense and promise and wonderment rises tangibly from its pages, the mark of a fine author.

There are slim, hardback volumes of the old classics - G. K. Chesterton writes essays faintly reminiscent of Borges, of libraries and maps and possibilities. Orwell recounts the many tumultuous events at Animal Farm; the unrest and dissatisfaction and wrongness suffered at the whims of dictatorship don't let me read for very long. The book is snapped shut; tea - now cold - is sipped.

The setting light of the sun reflects against the steel-and-glass of a neighbouring building, and shines into my room. The air is tinted golden. I leave for another cup of tea.

When I return, with a lightly brewed coffee instead, the light is fast fading. The rug is soft under me. Sun Tzu's Art of War sits on the bottom shelf, incriminating, demanding to be read. Its voice is difficult to ignore, but Robert Jordan's is insistent, insidious. A copy of the first book in the Wheel of Time sits among younger, newer brothers, the dog-eared edition published well before I was around, its pages so worn and brown they seem to have stories to tell of their own.

The words are familiar - the medieval archaisms repeated in Tolkien and Paolini's sagas, in the Riders of Pern and the Westerosi, across the breadth of Narnia and the amongst the elders of the Seelie courts. There are mages and sorcerers and wizards; dragons are rode and great battles are fought. Empires topple, kingships exchange hands, and through it all, the war of good and evil fight in a blinding, bloodstained tapestry.

And then the coffee is drained, and the book is read. Not completed, not yet, but enough. Enough, I think, for the day. Tomorrow will bring another tale, and we will await, nestled in soft blankets and fading light, and hope for the honor to bear witness to many lives, many deaths, many in-betweens.

Transcripted: Hugh Laurie's monologue from Tommorowland

If you glimpsed the future and you were frightened by what you saw, what do you do with that information? 

Who would you go to? Politicians? Captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck. The only facts they won’t challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in.

But... What if there was a way of skipping the middle man, and putting the critical news directly into everyone’s head?

The probability of widespread annihilation kept going up and the only way to stop it was to show it, and to scare people straight.

Because what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanised by the potential destruction of everything we have known or loved?!

To save civilisation, I would show its collapse.

And how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up, like a chocolate eclair!

They didn’t fear their demise; they repackaged it!

It could be enjoyed as video games! As TV shows! Books! Movies! The entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon.

Meanwhile, your earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one.

Bees and butterflies start to disappear. The glaciers melt; algae blooms. All around you, the coal mine canaries are dropping dead, and you won’t take the hint!

In every moment, there is the possibility of a better future, but you people won’t believe it! And because you won’t believe it, you won’t do what is necessary to make it a reality!

So you dwell on this terrible future; you resign yourselves to it. For one reason - because that future doesn’t ask anything of you today.

So, yes, you saw the iceberg, you warned the Titanic.

But you all steered for it anyway, full steam ahead.

Why? Because you want to sink.

The Power to Hurt.

If someone grants you the power to make them cry, remember to be kind.
Be soft with your words, be forgiving in your judgement, be gentle with your hands.
Hold and soothe and ease.
This is your only job. This is your only duty.
The power to hurt someone isn't a power; it is an obligation.
You are charged with proving to them that vulnerability isn't a sin, and love can be unconditional.
You are Atlas; you carry their world on your shoulders.
You have lost the right to hurt them, because they trust you enough to give you the power to hurt them.
Your charge will last until they are strong enough to realize their own person, and will continue after that too.
Be kind.
Be gentle.
Be forgiving.
It is your sole duty.
You aren't allowed to forget it.

Everything is Not Okay

The following is an extract of a conversation between Harry Potter and Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 77:

“There was a Muggle once named Mohandas Gandhi,” Harry sad. “He thought the government of Muggle Britain shouldn’t rule over his country. And he refused to fight. He convinced his whole country not to fight. Instead he told his people to walk up to the British soldiers and let themselves be struck down, without resisting, and when Britain couldn’t stand doing that any more, we freed his country. I thought it was a very beautiful thing, when I read about it, I thought it was something higher than all the wars that anyone had ever fought with guns or swords. That they’d really done that, and that it has actually worked.”

Harry drew another breath.

“Only then I found out that Gandhi told his people, during World War II, that if the Nazis invaded they should use non resistance against them, too. But the Nazis would’ve just shot everyone in sight. And maybe Winston Churchill always felt there should’ve been a better way, some clever way to win without having to hurt anyone; but he never found it, and so he had to fight.”

Harry looked up at the Headmaster, who was staring at him. “Winston Churchill was the one who tried to convince the British government not to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for a peace treaty, that they should fight right away-“

“I recognize the name, Harry,” said Dumbledore.

“The point is,” Harry said, after a brief pause to remember exactly who he was talking to, and fight down the suddenly returning sense that he was an ignorant child gone insane with audacity who had no right to be in this room and no right to question Albus Dumbledore about anything, “the point is, saying violence is evil isn’t an answer. It doesn’t say when to fight and when not to fight. It’s a hard question and Gandhi refused to deal with it, and that’s why I lost some of my respect for him.”

*******

No one asks the hard questions right? This one is for the rebels, for those who dare to defy the conformity bias that plagues our very species, for the ones who dare to be a little less insane.

TO read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, click here. I warn you this will be, in its own way, the most horrifying read of your life.

There is no gore or violence or rape or murder…. Just the worst kinds of truth.

TO read more about conformity bias, click here.

TO read more about cognitive biases in general, check out the wiki website dedicated to the Methods of Rationality here.

TO learn more about Nazi Germany and post-WWII Germany, you can watch the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg here.

Thank you for your time.

Feel free to google+ and add me to your circle for future updates.

"I'm Such A Nerd! :D"

Being a nerd has certainly gotten popular these days, hasn't it?
Which is ridiculous, you know. Remember the days when we were the kids in Elvish cosplay, getting stuffed into lockers - well, figuratively, at least - and teased for our fluency in Klingon?  

*sigh. 
Those were the days. 

OKay, admittedly, that was before my time. For me, it's been all abolition of house elf slavery (go Team Dobby!) and looking down my nose at anyone who hasn't read the Game of Thrones books. (ASIOF, anyone?) 

I've read a few hundred fanfictions - no, really, I have -, can intelligently debate the merits of martyring Severus Snape, can rattle off fifty spells off the top of my head, along with an example of usage, list off three generations of ancestors for virtually every major character - and that's only Harry Potter. Let's not even get started with Game of Thrones, or His Dark Materials, or Narnia, or heck, even Twilight. 

And a lot people laugh their ass off at us, you know. 

What's the point, you idiot?, they ask.

It's a valid question.  
Nowhere in my life is the fact that Abraxas Malfoy and Pollux Black were the great-grandfathers of Draco Malfoy going to be of any use to me.  
The fact that I let A Clash of Kings sit on my bookshelf for two solid months because Ned Stark died at the end of A Game of Thrones and that broke me is plain silly, because he's "not even real".  
I cried at the end of The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass because Lyra and Pantalaimon and Will were braver  and stronger and so, so much more than I could ever hope to be, and for what?  

stupidstupidstupid 

It's almost unnecessary, the way we invest ourselves in their lives, they way we grow so hopelessly attached to some paper and ink, to the fictional lives of impossible people, that when we're done and we put it away, we wrap up a little bit of our souls in them. 

Bit crazy, the lot of us.

That's why the sheepish "I'm such a nerd" thing bothers us so much. Being a nerd isn't this sort of worldwide brotherhood it once used to be, where you could just bond with just about anyone who had a crush on Arwen. Now it's some kind of ridiculous excuse these fucking wannabe popular kids use to explain away their passing interest in Star Wars. 

Like, no bitch, you aren't a nerd. Being a nerd means loving something, wholly and absolutely, means allowing yourself to be emotionally connected to something intangible and wonderful and little bit infinite. 

It isn't a fucking suffix you can add to end of your sentence like, "Oh my gawsh, I totes just watched all 5 Star Trek movies - I'm such a NERD!"  

You're NOT a part of nerd-dom, you're staring at its butt as it passes by. 

(In case you're wondering, there are 6 Original series movies, 4 Next Gen movies and 2 in the reboot series.)(And yes, I did borrow that line from a Cyanide and Happiness comic strip. Sue me.) 

We aren't the popular kids - because we never cared much for it. What we've wanted has always been simple - a good conversation over coffee with someone intelligent and quick witted, friends who let us use words like pretentious and hyperbolic and don't consider us pretentious or hyperbolic for it, someone to cry with about Ygritte and Catelyn Stark; easy, silly, wonderful things that are never that easily found. 

We've learnt love from Lily Potter, persistence from Skywalker, and patience from Gandalf.
We've battled Labyrinthine monsters, and stood in the halls of Olympus.
We've lived and lost a thousand times.
We've loved and been betrayed, and we've closed each book and put it away, and we've come out better men for it. 

There are things that our meagre lives can't teach us, things hidden in the words of someone else, and goddamnit, we take pride in that courage to learn from a hero's mistakes. 

This is who we are, this is how we feel. You are not a nerd, we are.

Why?
Because we took the time to discover, and the patience to love, and the imagination to believe.
That is what makes us who are, and makes you who you are not.
We're nerds, and we're bloody proud. 

Addendum:
Here's 50 spells, just for the heck of it:
1.   Reparo
2.   Wingardium Leviosa
3.   Lumos
4.   Lumos Solarus
5.   Nox
6.   Expelliarmus
7.   Avada Kedavra
8.   Imperio
9.   Crucio
10.        Impedimenta
11.        Accio
12.        Obliviate
13.        Duro
14.        Muffliato
15.        Obliviate
16.        Levicorpus
17.        Liberacorpus
18.        Tantellegra
19.        Confundus
20.        Reducto
21.        Engorgio
22.        Expecto Patronum
23.        Riddikulus
24.        Episkey
25.        Evanesco
26.        Relashio
27.        Specialis Revelio
28.        Homenum Revelio
29.        Erecto
30.        Locomotor Mortis
31.        Petrificus Totalus
32.        Glisseo
33.        Furnunculus
34.        Serpensortia
35.        Sectumsempra
36.        Avis Oppugno
37.        Orchideum
38.        Aguamenti
39.        Diffindo
40.        Finite Incantatum 

Eh. So it isn't fifty. Still, I wanted to check my spelling on Evanesco, and found this: Wikipedia's List of Spells used in Harry Potter. Nifty, huh?

Thanks for reading, and if you liked it, don’t forget to google+ and add me to your circle for future updates!