Consider where that methane / natural gas is coming from. Their homepage says (with the world's most convoluted hyphen-omitting compound adjective, but basically see the last 6 words):
> March 2024: Terraform completes the end to end demo, successfully producing fossil carbon free pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air.
If you take carbon from the air, mix in energy from the sun to turn it into a fuel, then burn the fuel (undoing the reaction), where is the pollution?
There's more efficient ways to solve the climate problem than to install ginormous amounts of gas production, like you can run a heat pump instead of creating methane from that energy, but it's a solution that'll please even the old farts (no pun intended)
Not seeing the economics for this ever truly working out, CO2 PPM is very low despite our best efforts and the amount of energy required for separation is substantial.
The economics of taking out a loan or insurance for things you can pay out of pocket also don't work out, but there are apparently entire countries routinely buying groceries and appliances on credit
I'm not saying this is a logical thing to do (note where I wrote "There's more efficient ways to solve the climate problem"), but I've seen humans making less sensible decisions than this one so, who knows, it might actually happen...
I honestly can't tell if this is a bot post because of just how bad I find Deepseek R1 to be. When asking it complex questions based on an app I'm working on, it always gives a flawed response that breaks the program. Where Claude is sometimes wrong, but not consistently wrong and completely missing the point of the question like Deepseek R1 100% is. Claude I can work with, Deepseek is trash. I've had no luck with it at all and don't bother trying anymore
That is exactly what TikTok does, they are more popular because their tastes algorithm is even better than Shorts for figuring out what you actually want to watch
> Best Novel: Emily Tesh -- Some Desperate Glory (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you
> Best Novella: T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) -- Thornhedge (Tor, Titan UK)
A retelling of sleeping beauty from the perspective of an atypical fairy godmother and knight. There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story.
> Best Novelette: Naomi Kritzer -- “The Year Without Sunshine” (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023)
One tiny community pulls together – and does it effectively – because one community member is suffering from COPD and will only live as long as her oxygen concentrator has power.
> Best Short Story: Naomi Kritzer -- “Better Living Through Algorithms” (Clarkesworld May 2023)
Linnea, a young woman working a boring office job, is told about a new productivity and wellness app called Abelique from a friend. When her boss encourages her to download it to increase her productivity, she is surprised when the app encourages her to prioritize her personal life to the neglect of her professional life.
> Best Series: Ann Leckie -- Imperial Radch (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the principal power in human space is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses space ships controlled by AIs, who control human bodies ("ancillaries") to use as soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, which Leckie conveys by using "she" pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess, frequently incorrectly, when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.
I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging:
SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey.
... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ...
"The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.
It's too late for me to scream at clouds, about the politicization of literature awards. Should I lament the rise of the MFA and the institutionalization of writing fiction in the academy? That ship has sailed and many celebrate that, which is fine.
And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.
I especially want to read writing by authors who can hold conflicting ideas in their heads without imploding and are able to say to themselves, "there's a high probability that all my fundamental values and beliefs are wrong and it is instead 'they' — the spectral, despicable They! — who are ethically and philosophically correct."
I imagine a sci-fi author who has seen further than other humans, and wants to share what they have seen. I'd also love beautiful sentences if possible.
Then I'd love literary sci-fi prizes whose judges have a deep and principled understanding of human history, who aren't activists in spirit, but want contrarian ideas that set the imagination and intellect on fire about the possibilities of technology and science and human problem solving. Finally, I want a sci-fi prize that conveys optimism about humanity on the cusp of great accomplishments; humanity on the verge of even greater and more bewildering and challenging adventures.
Why are relationships, identities, trauma, and oppression trivial ideas? Why do you think these authors cannot hold conflicting views in their mind?
I fully appreciate what you’re trying to say and absolutely there should be an award for what you’re looking for too. But it doesn’t help the discussion to put down those who write what you’re not interested in.
You might already know this but my recommendation would be to look at the Nebula awards. Those are industry awards. The Hugo is a fan award so the style of writing is much more likely to change as popular tastes change.
It is good you are trying to appreciate what he is saying.
For another attempt at explaining for you in a simplified matter: Dragons and monsters are for fantasy genre even if they wear a spacesuit, relationships and drama for romantic novels even if they wear a spacesuite, science and technonology are for science fiction.
Hugo awards core description is sci fi and fantasy as per their declaration.
Hugo awarded novels core prediction is whether there are gender multiplicities in the novel which is not that scientific of fantastic. It has danger of killing the scifi genre or the awards. Although I sympathize, I find it boring on a scifi or fantasy perspective
> science and technonology are for science fiction.
There isn't one universally accepted definition of science fiction, but historically, the Hugo Awards have been broader than just stories about science and technology.
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961 and winner of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel was 1) extremely political, 2) about people and relationships, not science or technology, and 3) is beloved as a classic science fiction book.
Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle is an alternate history book - it doesn't deal with science or technology as such, but it won a Hugo Award in 1963
> Hugo awarded novels core prediction is whether there are gender multiplicities in the novel which is not that scientific of fantastic
Gender as a theme in science fiction goes back at least to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969 (it won the Hugo too).
What you're complaining about isn't new, and it isn't killing science fiction or the Hugo Awards.
> What you're complaining about isn't new, and it isn't killing science fiction or the Hugo Awards.
Ha! Just because a situation isn't new doesn't mean that it's good or shouldn't be improved or wasn't flawed or doesn't warrant criticism.
As for killing awards: the concern is that audience interest in the output of awards will be killed or has been killed already. But "killing" is too dramatic a term, and institutions can take an impressively long time to die: it's more that our natural constituency of nerds will be bored to death, not that anyone cares; and the general audience won't see anything uniquely valuable.
As for killing sci-fi, you correctly noted that there's no universally accepted definition of the genre! It's difficult to kill what one can't even identify! Or is the inability to define it a sign that it's already dead? (Hence the ridiculous and gutless "sci-fi and fantasy" lists where everything is fantasy?)
But as that judge once said: "I don't know how to define [sci-fi], but I know it when I see it." If we're being honest, we all know what sci-fi is: It's the genre of literature that takes science and scientific methods of problem solving seriously. It looks at the world through science. That's not so bad. :-)
Science Fiction has a long history of exploring the political climate of the day by extrapolating from the current period. Frankenstein is a good classic example of course but even something like War of the Worlds has many possible interpretations some of which are deeply political.
I'm all for awards which promote hard sci-fi. I also appreciate that for someone who's looking for that sort of novel the latest awards feel like they might put that genre at risk.
> Science Fiction has a long history of exploring the political climate of the day by extrapolating from the current period. Frankenstein is a good classic example…
I would like to know your reasons for thinking this. I see Frankenstein as something far more perverse. Mary Shelly wrote it after the traumatic loss of her child in childbirth. Knowing this, it is hard to understand the novel as anything other than a speculation: ‘if men could make life, what form would that life-giving take?’
I think political was probably a poor word choice by me. Maybe just societal would have been better. I see the primary comments to be bothered by sci-fi that is addressing more than just “what if X was possible.” Frankenstein addresses both grief(or trauma to tie it to my first comment) and societal acceptance of outcasts(relationships). Maybe those things flow freely for you from “what if X was possible.” They do for me. But the comment I was initially responding to seems to think they don’t, or at least shouldn’t be core to science fiction.
“If men could give life what form would that life-giving take?” Is the first portion of the book. The remainder is “and how would humanity react”. That second piece is core, in my opinion, to any good science fiction and will always include much more than just science and be molded by the time in which it’s written.
> Why are relationships, identities, trauma, and oppression trivial ideas?
That's just, my opinion. :-)
It's difficult to explain if you, with access to the entire corpus of literature humans have published until now, and having read 10, 20, 50, 100 or more of past and current books, don't already know why.
It's impossible to explain if those are the things you already think are most important.
One way — and there are many others — to think about it is to ask: what can I use these ideas in this book to build that will advance humanity? Another is: what is new about what this author is saying that hasn't already been said by anyone in the past?
> Why do you think these authors cannot hold conflicting views in their mind?
This one is more simple (but you can probably invent a better method here as well): Read any recent award winning book that "interrogates identity" (or pick another MFA blurb descriptor) then write down what you think the author's values are. Often enough, if you simply take the view that the author's values are slightly or completely mistaken, the entire novel ceases to have a purpose.
Holding a conflicting view in my mind means being able to wholeheartedly (and at least, while writing) believe that my fundamental values and assumptions about the world are wrong.
p.s. Another reply to your comment also explained it rather nicely.
To try to succinctly respond to both points, I think the most clear way to describe the conflict is that you have different fundamental values than these authors do. Which of course I'm sure you understand.
I think you'd agree with the statement: "things that do not advance humanity are trivial". And that's totally fine, plenty of people feel that way. But not everyone does.
Furthermore that also assumes that "advancing humanity" is a clearly definable thing. I know plenty of people who'd argue that helping people understand the relationships in their life as advancing humanity.
But of course none of that really matters. I fully agree that there should be a multitude of awards which exist to promote diversity of thought and topic in literature.
My main point though is that these discussions suffer and don't go as far if they turn into a discussion about the value of the content as opposed to simply discussing the type of content we're looking to promote.
> My main point though is that these discussions suffer and don't go as far if they turn into a discussion about the value of the content as opposed to simply discussing the type of content we're looking to promote.
That makes sense. I think I mostly agree with you.
I do think that some values are objectively better than others. I believe, for instance, that societies that survive while other decay, do so because they happen, intentionally or accidentally, to discover or adopt objectively better values. Sci-fi is an especially well-placed genre to think about such questions: What got us here so successfully? What will take us into the future?
The practical definition of "things that advance humanity" is: the values/priorities/ideas that enable human civilizations to survive and not go extinct.
> I know plenty of people who'd argue that helping people understand the relationships in their life as advancing humanity.
I feel bad that such people are having so much difficulty that they need a stream of new novels to understand their relationships, assuming that these books even succeed at that. But such is life I guess. :-(
I'm re-reading The Expanse series, which started in 2011. I was talking about it with some friends, and they basically said, "Oh cool my MFA friends really like that series because it has so many non-binary relationships and stuff." I'm paraphrasing but you get the gist.
I literally had to stop and think about it. It's not that I didn't notice while I was reading that there was relationship stuff going on, and concepts of identities, traumas and oppression, it's just that all those things were woven so well into some damn good hard science fiction that it just felt natural right next to rail guns, asteroid bases and mysterious alien stuff.
Whether the series has optimism about humanity ... well I personally think the point of the series is to explore that.
The series won a Hugo in 2020 and I think they deserved it.
Speaking as someone who rolled his eyes at the synopsis of each entry in GP's list... I mean, you can just ignore the awards.
Like, think of it like the Oscars. It has been a very long time that "winning an Oscar" was predictive of how much I would enjoy a movie. What would some book awards be any different?
Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned.
> A lot of the themes covered there just don't appeal to my tastes either.
Yes. That's how I feel. Sorry I didn't elucidate.
The broader point I was making is about what I see as a pipeline problem. I don't want to generalize too much but if you've also attempted to get a novel or short story published, or apply for a writing workshop/grant/fellowship/retreat so that you can work on a novel you've drafted, you tend to encounter strange dynamics that I'm not sure I can competently describe without sounding like a "reply guy".
Nevertheless, I'm … concerned that literary culture is being (already has been) shaped into something that makes the books I'm interested in increasingly rare. Either they never get published, or take longer to get published than they otherwise would, or they are self-published and don't receive the editorial attention they deserve, or are never promoted, making them harder to find and subsequent work from that author unlikely.
I don't have comprehensive data to demonstrate this and it's impossible to prove counterfactuals. But to the extent that prizes are how an industry or community presents its culture to the rest of the world, I worry about ideological capture and try to pitch different directions.
I have no idea how the book industry works, but I think I sort of understand the problem you are gesturing at.
Instead of being worried, I just feel an unsurmountable sense of apathy to new publications. Maybe due to my disconnect and disinterest in themes being addressed, and what I perceive as excessive contamination of current sociopolitical agitation. Stories are often highjacked to in favor of those things. Perhaps it was always like this, and I just didn't know better? It changes little.
This extends to other forms of art, such as movies, comics, videogames. My solution was embracing the past, sticking to things created more than a decade and a half ago. For more modern things, I try to look at more independent produced works.
Maybe I am just too old and boring at this point.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane"
> I just feel an unsurmountable sense of apathy to new publications[…] disinterest in themes being addressed […]
You've nailed it: there's a massive disconnect because this alienation of the interested reader as well as the average person, is not even recognised as a problem.
> My solution was embracing the past, sticking to things created more than a decade and a half ago.
It's wild that I was told something similar by a mentor. And it's an excellent strategy.
> a decade and a half ago was the day before yesterday.
Ha! True. Which was why he said "more than a decade and a half ago", and in the comment below he said to go even further back in time. :-) I was told simply not to bother reading stuff from my generation.
> And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.
Still quite a lot of that around, AIUI. Just takes (quite a bit) more trial and error to find it nowadays.
> Just takes (quite a bit) more trial and error to find it nowadays.
Agreed. I can't complain too strenuously about being required to do more legwork to find good writing. If I'm going to spend a week or longer with a book, I'm happy to do more than merely swipe-right, swipe-left :-)
I love this controversy. I swear it's the most exciting thing in modern physics. The thought that there's something fundamentally wrong with the cosmic distance ladder and the way that we measure the expansion of the universe.
I'm no mathematician or physicist, but this stuff just fascinates me. I interpret it something like:
The further one looks, the faster objects in the universe are expanding. However, when one looks out at the universe, they are looking backwards in time, to a time when the universe was expanding at a more rapid pace. Right? Close to the big bang? Because there was a period of rapid expansion after the big bang, so the universe had to have moved faster in the earlier universe? So the only part of space that actually appears to be static would be around our local space, the stars we can see?
Often the universe is depicted as a giant bubble, expanding outwards in all directions. It is how the human mind is built to think, a classic blunder dating back to the days of Ptolemy, where Earth was the center of everything.
At the edge of our observable universe is the beginning of it all. We can fast forward then through time to see the most modern picture of our universe, the reference frame that is our own galaxy. We are not at rest in a static galaxy, so why should the laws of relativity and dilation not apply to massive objects
Everywhere else we look is in the past, and the cosmic background is visible from every direction. So once expanded in 3D space, and accounting for time, all of space would appear to be accelerating towards the cosmic background and point of the big bang?
“[...]But in 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble measured the speed of many galaxies and found, to his surprise, that all were moving away from us-- in fact, the further away the galaxy, the faster it was going. His measurements showed that space is expanding everywhere, and no matter where you look, it will seem as if all galaxies are receding because the distance between everything is constantly growing. Faced with this news, Einstein decided to remove the cosmological constant from his equations.” -some scientific American article
It’s not moving away from us, it’s moving towards the beginning of time at a faster and faster rate, but only because we’re looking backwards through time. In reality, due to our reference frame, and other subsequent frames of observed bodies, we are the only point in the observable universe that is in the “present”. To that effect, when everything appears to be moving away from us at a faster and faster rate, it is moving away from the origin (big bang) at a slower and slower rate.
Galaxies are not moving away, they are showing an accelerating speed due to the time difference, and the slightly higher cosmological constant several hundred million years in the past, a constant that scales with time and its relation to distance according to metric expansion and the speed of light. It is the higher constant with relation to distance that gives the illusion of a universe whose expansion is accelerating.
It can be assumed then, that as you move between vast points in space, the universe will update; showing that astronomical objects aren’t accelerating away, but are not in fact moving at all. If not moving towards each other and closer together.
So no matter where you travel, it is likely that the bubble of the observable universe travels with you, you do not accelerate away faster the closer you get to the galaxies that appear from Earth or other reference points from Earth to be expanding faster away.
If you look at the night sky from a planet in one of these far away galaxies, the overall structure of the universe would be very similar if not the same to the structure as it appears from Earth. With all galaxies appearing to be accelerating away from each other at a faster and faster rate.
This, especially if it is early onset. I had a friend who lost most of his hair by the time he was 20 and it absolutely destroyed his confidence for many years
Yep, take a look at the side effects. There are a lot related to chest pain, and believe me when I say I got all of them. A few minutes after I put even a single drop on my scalp it was doubled over clutching my chest. It was the Kirkland signature 5%. I stopped taking it after a few months (I really wanted it to work) and even after I kept getting chest pain episodes until about a year later.
