Paste a passage from your favourite speculative fiction, replacing all the proper nouns with “Lemmy”. Then I’ll try to guess where it came from without using google :)
Paste a passage from your favourite speculative fiction, replacing all the proper nouns with “Lemmy”. Then I’ll try to guess where it came from without using google :)
Sounds post-apocaplytic - like radioactive wastelands. Something like The Crysalids (which I haven’t read in 30+ years and cannot remember most details of now). Could also be something more speculative biology – like the latter parts of the Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, or one of the later books in Bulter’s Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis) series. There’s a couple of writers with biology backgrounds (Brin, Tchaikovsky, etc.) that would naturally gravitate towards having biologists or ecologists as POV characters. Requesting a hint: is it on Earth?
Not on Earth, though the person talking here is a human colonist from Earth (though they aren’t in contact with Earth, given the distance and time they traveled).
Okay, so I still don’t know what it is, but I have “To Be Taught, if Fortunate” by Becky Chambers in my to-read queue, and I suspect this might be it. It has that letters written back to earth vibe that I’m expecting once I start reading it.
Nope. Let me find a different excerpt:
Okay, I still don’t have an answer. But I know for certain that, had I read this book, I would remember it haha. It does remind me of Vandermeer somewhat, but all of his books that I’ve read were on Earth. It also evokes the Pequeninos from Orson Scott Cards “Speaker for the Dead”, a species that ends their life as a tree. But in the latter case, they begin their life as an animal, so the plant POV here doesn’t match, in particular the disdain it shows for animals.
But it sounds amazing! It’s like a first contact story where the alien is intelligent and alien. Tchaikovsky would be proud.
It is a first contact story in a way, though it’s the humans who are the aliens arriving on the planet.
Also, the speaker (“bamboo”) in the second quote may be a “plant”, but other than being RNA-based (like some simple life forms on Earth; the book/series assumes panspermia on a building blocks of life level), life on that planet isn’t in any way related to Earth life (well, except for the humans themselves once they arrive). The “bamboo” might mention “pines” in that excerpt, but both “bamboo” and “pines” are just what the humans would come to call those species opon their discovery, because they remind them of the respectively named plant species back on Earth.
@troyunrau Do you want me to resolve it or are you hoping someone else will guess it?
Let’s leave it for now, and resolve in the future. It sounds like a great book and should be in my queue haha, but the point of the thread was to create some self-starter content for the community. And there’s still a chance someone else will know ;)