#downbelow
Text
Herbal Ice 🧁
2 notes
·
View notes
Photo
#tribulation #candelabrummetalfest #candelabrum #thechildrenofthenight #downbelow #wherethegloombecomessound #theformulasofdeath #deathmetal #blackmetal https://www.instagram.com/p/CiB6NOBDQRP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
#tribulation#candelabrummetalfest#candelabrum#thechildrenofthenight#downbelow#wherethegloombecomessound#theformulasofdeath#deathmetal#blackmetal
1 note
·
View note
Text
vote yes if you have finished the entire book.
vote no if you have not finished the entire book.
(faq · submit a book)
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post.
That'll be it for me + SF for today but who knows about tomorrow ? If you want to make suggestions for other polls, please do.
#polls#science fiction#sf polls#a scanner darkly#philip k. dick#the demolished man#alfred bester#dhalgren#samuel r. delany#samuel delany#cryptonomicon#neal stephenson#the day of the triffids#john wyndham#roadside picnic#arkady strugatsky#boris strugatsky#stand on zanzibar#john brunner#downbelow station#c.j. cherryh#the lady astronaut of mars#mary robinette kowal
26 notes
·
View notes
Text
C.J. Cherryh really said "this meeting could have been an email" all the way back in 1981.
#tapping into the universal human emotion of not wanting to be in a meeting#this character will 1000% mutiny#CJ Cherryh#downbelow station#books#sci fi
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
The worst atrocities began with half-measures, with apologies, compromising with the wrong side, shrinking from what had to be done.
-Downbelow Station, C.J. Cherryh
12 notes
·
View notes
Note
favourite books, or favourite books from this year?
This is too difficult to narrow down to one or two, so here's a top five? (As of the start of September, because this has been sitting in my drafts for a WHILE)
In no particular order
Circe, by Madeline Miller - in terms of prose, Miller might literally be my favorite author writing today. She needs to have written more, please. Just perfectly beautiful and tragic and properly mythic and altogether sublime. Lodged in my head as the canonical telling of the myth of Circe to compare others to.
Downbelow Station, by C. J. Cherryh - I've rambled on about this at length already, but this is the rare piece of SFF that really feels plausible to me? Like, not in the sense of technology, but that there's no main character, that chance and contingency and weight of history matter more than the grand destiny of any individual or family, that the world is fundamentally amoral without being fundamentally malevolent, and just, it reads like it could be the history of the future. That's a really rare accomplishment. Also for what a cultural wasteland the 80s are supposed to have been it really didn't feel dated at all. (I've got two other Cherryh books that have been sitting on my dresser for six months I should really get to)
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee - The acknowledgements for this book mention it was inspired by The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and you can tell (in the best possible way). One of the rare pop-sci books that really feels like it expands you understanding of the world and lifts some small few of the scales from your eyes. Also oddly hopeful and inspiring, for all the horrors (the very, very well-described horrors. I went form barely knowing what leukemia was to having nightmares about it).
Radiance, by Catherynne Valente - I do adore Valente's writing, but this is probably the first full length work of hers I've read that lives up to the novellas and short stories. It coasts by almost entirely on style and aesthetic and how perfectly aimed the character and arc of the protagonist is at me in particular, but my god the style and aesthetic are worth the price of admission. The whole thing should really fall apart under the weight of its pretension, and I really love it for the fact that it doesn't.
India in the Persianate Age, by Richard M. Eaton - A rather dry history text, really, and not one I'd really recommend to someone who just asked me for a book to read. But I've got at least a vague view-from-ten-thousand-feet idea of the shape of history from the medieval era on, and India was (and to a lesser extent is) one of the main remaining gaps. So I'm deeply appreciative for providing an organizing narrative of the region's development to use. And just generally, one of those books that really feels like its filling in little blank spots on the map? Sure it's dry, but just incredibly interesting subject matter and well-argued thesis.
(Honorable Mentions: The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi, The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri)
#anon#book review#India in the Persianate Age#Richard M. Eaton#Radiance#Catherynne Valente#The Emperor of All Maladies#Siddhartha Mukherjee#Downbelow Station#C.J. Cherryh#Circe#Madeline Miller
39 notes
·
View notes
Text
So, I have been reading a lot of C J Cherryh recently and my overwhelming thought about her books so far is that it's really a shame that Downbelow Station came out in 1981 and not today because a) tumblr would love Josh Talley so goddamned much and b) there would be so much Josh/Damon/Elene fic.
Tumblr loves sad sweet pathetic dudes who have committed atrocities, right? Please go read Downbelow Station.
#if downbelow station came out today#it wouldn't have so much charmingly retro tape-based tech though#and i do love the tape-based tech
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
i need to get back on goodreads bc i thought about how many books i started to read and then didnt finish bc i was reading another book. i was like "wow i feel like im reading, but i am not finishing anything" yeah. this is why.
#good reads gives me a little bar to fill up and everything#i need to get. tris's book. lost souls. downbelow station. frisk. our wives in the sea or w/e#book club#another one that was short. oh Fever dream
2 notes
·
View notes
Note
Hello again I meant Downbelow. Downbelow Station. Weird name, it sounds like Australia. The aliens were dumb but the space war was cool.
re
Yeah so like three different people said this was probably it so honestly my bad for failing to make the connection.
And so a) yes amazing book all time fave everyone read it b) ....thanks?
2 notes
·
View notes
Note
What would you recommend as a good intro to CJ Cherryh? You've several times talked very highly of her work, and I'm curious now.
Depends on your preferences.
If you're a fantasy fan, I'd start with The Dreamstone and/or Tree of Swords and Jewels. If you prefer fantasy that's edging a bit toward SF, then you want the "Morgaine Cycle" of books that begin with Gate of Ivrel, a great favorite of both mine and @petermorwood's . (Don't be weirded out by the first-edition Mike Whelan cover on Ivrel: Mike was being fabulously subversive on that.) If you prefer straightforward unambivalent hard SF, try the "Company Wars" books that begin with Downbelow Station. And there are the fabulous "Chanur" books, featuring an interstellar trading family of lioness-like hominids who get caught up with a member of the weird "human" species...
And all of that said: I have favorites among these that are standalones, or are "off the beaten track" of one or another of her major universes. My absolute favorite of the favorites is Hunter of Worlds, which is one of the best get-into-your-aliens'-minds books I know—unquestionably an influence on my Rihannsu work for Star Trek.
So there you have it. Pick a spot and jump in! You've got so much terrific reading ahead of you. :)
286 notes
·
View notes
Note
Can't wait for someone in the discord to go "waaa X has gore art so they must like dead people!!"its happened be4... GUYS SAY IT WITH ME GORE ART DOESNT =A BAD PERSON ... Like Im struggling to understand how me liking gore art makes me a bad person I love horror I love scary art that makes me uncomfy whats bad about that? /gen anyways if you guys have horror ocs say ur af downbelow
.
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
downBelow
133 notes
·
View notes
Text
24 Books for 2024
I was tagged by @bigcats-birds-and-books! thanks! I'm really enjoying these lists.
I'm going to try to pick books that are already on my TBR or are physical books I already own(*).
Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
The Fires of Heaven (WOT #5)*
The Iliad trans. by Emily Wilson*
Why We Sleep*
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser*
The City We Became
Vorkosigan Saga (yeah, just... all of it)
To Shape a Dragon's Breath
How to Resist Amazon and Why
Bloodmarked
The Bone Shard Daughter*
Downbelow Station*
Sky Coyote
I Am Spock*
The Hands of the Emperor
Black Sun Rising*
This is How You Lose the Time War
Peter Wimsey books
Deathless Divide
Vespertine
Ace by Angela Chen
An Adrian Czajkowski book (probably Children of Time)
Payback's a Witch
The Spare Man
General reading goals include: one nonfiction book a month, translated books, older books, keep poking through my shelf of unread books, the usual
tag: YOU, YES YOU
13 notes
·
View notes
Note
byron + 1, 2, 5, 24,
Oh fuck yeah I was hoping someone would do this. This is going to be a massive wall of text and I'm sorry but also I'm really not. You have unleashed the infodump dragon and it's not leaving until it's run off some of its zoomies.
Why do you like or dislike this character?
You know a fun fact about me is that I was on Team Byron Disliker when I first started Season 5 just due to what I'd heard through pop culture osmosis. I even made a post to that effect after watching a couple of his episodes (deleted now because I was sick of seeing it in my notes) that got some circulation in the fandom. But the further I got into that arc and the more I thought about him, the less I saw what I expected to see when I started. Instead I saw someone who, though flawed, spent most of the time he was on screen trying to be gentle and compassionate and trying to protect his people in a situation that was hell bent on making it as hard as possible for him to do those things.
I do think he has a manipulative streak, and I do think he's the type to occasionally do very hurtful things because he believes he's doing so for the right reasons (see for example that fucking "doesn't it feel nice to be asked" scene between him and Lyta in The Paragon of Animals, even as a Lyta/Byron shipper that makes me SO ANGRY because that point could be made in LITERALLY any other way that didn't involve demeaning her and shouting at her, I get that you're pissed off at the people who did that to her but taking it out on her isn't gonna help anyone so stop) but those flaws when combined with his genuine good intentions and abundance of care are fascinating.
A big part of why I think people dislike him as a character is because those flaws are presented as an immutable Fact Of Who He Is, which, yeah, I can see why someone would find that insufferable, but I like writing character growth and he deserves some.
Tl;dr, I like him because he's complicated. I dislike the way canon never seemed to want to grapple with those complications.
Favorite canon thing about this character?
That scene with the one guy in Downbelow. You know the one. Letting someone punch you repeatedly because you want to teach them a lesson about how finding a target to beat up on isn't actually going to solve their problems is... genuinely fucking baller and I wish we'd gotten to see more of that side of him.
Also that thing with Lyta in Strange Relations that's basically a mutual "I'm not overextending myself YOU'RE overextending yourself! Please slow down and rest 🥺" is probably what made me ship them as hard as I do. Dipping out of canon and into my fic for a second, but that interaction is so different from their first interaction that I kind of have to wonder if someone talked to him about the way he treated her. (I may have written a missing scene about that but it needs some fine tuning before I feel good about posting it.)
What's the first song that comes to mind when you think about them?
oh my god!!! so many. SO MANY. But uhhhh I can narrow it down to like four?
Runaway by The National as a general theme song
I, Carrion (Icarian) by Hozier as a soft and sad song for him and Lyta
The Deserter's Song by Radical Face as a backstory reveal song
New World Coming (any version but I like the one by Nina Simone best because. Come on. It's Nina fucking Simone how can you top that) because I'm almost certain it was one of the songs JMS pulled from when he was writing That Song For That Scene.
What other character from another fandom of yours that reminds you of them?
I've been saying this from the very beginning��� The Signless from Homestuck. (Yes, I'm a Homestuck enjoyer. Sorry.) I just love my pacifist resistance leaders with feral partners and tragic endings okay.
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
The stars, like all man's other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth's own great oceans, or into the air, or into space.
- Downbelow Station, C.J. Cherryh
3 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
zephyrstargame
Zephyr Star
weabooweedwitch
mahou shoujo & marijuana
kael-lord-of-the-underworld
Kael Starr
damian-vasquez
:::::::::DISAIKNER:::::::::::
impossibly-named
Tech Witch