mindstalk: (lizqueen)
I got a box of books today: Buck Godot PSmith, and the 3 volumes of the Crest of the Stars novels. I have now read all 4 items. I'd read the Godot before, not sure where, I hope I don't find a duplicate copy hiding somewhere.

Mercy cut )
mindstalk: (robot)
I've moved on from Crest of the Stars to Banner of the Stars. Observations: more battles, less character; OTOH, there are more characters, so the development is spread beyond Jinto and Lafiel. The Baronh opening voiceover doesn't change much -- the same for 8 episodes, then switched to a different sameness; this is vs. continually new information in Crest. There's a lot of countdowns from 10. A few episodes have overly-long recaps, of course that's aggravated by watching the episodes back to back, not separated by a week. Still, I'm liking it, and excited to watch it, as in "eeee I'm going to go home and watch Banner."

But some scenes of note, relevant to the subject:

Read more... )
mindstalk: (robot)
A draft, for the Bujold list, contrast of the Abh and Bujold's haut.
===

I recently watched the anime Crest of the Stars, and liked it a lot. It's part space opera, part character romance, part worldbuilding regarding the Abh race by a wannabe science fictional Tolkien (we can has conlang). But I'm not out to specifically review it here; rather, I kept being reminded of Bujold as I watched, and I want to geek out about that.

(FWIW, the Crest of the Stars novels started in 1999, and Cetaganda came out in 1996.)
(Spoilers for backstory ahoy.)
(ETA: the Abh are allegedly all atheists. Cetagandan religious data is even scarcer than for other polities in Bujold's Nexus, but one guesses atheist.)
(ETA2: might be more accurate to say they're strongly non religious. "No belief in a Higher Power", "ridicule all organized religions", no belief in Heaven. I'd call the first one de facto atheist but people get nervous about labels.)

Read more... )
We, alas, don't have gestation machines, and I wouldn't hold my breath for them. We do have a fair bit of fertility control -- planning, birth control, abortion -- which have had some social impacts already, and we might imagine might have more over evolutionary time. I've been thinking for the past day about the impact of widespread paternity testing, e.g. if such tests weren't used mostly only in cases of disputed child support but as a matter of course, even for married births, just to check for the father or as a side effect of genetic health screening. How does behavior change in the short term if fathers can be as certain as mothers of their children, and women (and men) know that reproductive cuckoldry just isn't possible? What are the long term selective pressures on human sexuality if such conditions (paternity testing and fertility control, and perhaps child support laws as well) are maintained for a long time?
mindstalk: (robot)
This series I watched in a few days. Admittedly it's 13 episodes instead of 26, but that's not the real difference; the difference is that this one pressed most of my buttons. This, and the sequel Banner of the Stars, are minor classics in their own right. It can be described equally (if superficially) as "space opera with space elves", or "an understated teen romance/character piece". Compared to Bebop, I'd call it "consistent and coherent". Hell, it's that compared to a lot of science fiction, period. It reminds me a bit of Bujold's Cetagandans, too.

That got long )

The purple-haired girl in my icon is not an Abh, but Zefiris, a 5000 year old sentient war machine in Scrapped Princess. Her model looks like ten year old girls when they're in low power mode. When armed, they look like dragons as rendered by Vorlons/Shadows.

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July 2025

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