Player Piano is the only one that's functionally more "sci-fi" than "Vonnegut," his first. The rest — the four above maybe the most? but then there's Slapstick and of course Slaughterhouse Five — just use sci-fi devices to get at the kinds of things he wants to get at, in ways other writers don't/won't/can't/never…

Oddly, I couldn't get into those ones. I hear good things about FOS (though I haven't heard much good about CC)... but after Motherless Brooklyn (which I totally forgot to include, but it would have been an outlier to the above list, I suppose) his work got a little too ...literary for me.

Don't trust anybody who says, "Urine, for a treat!"

I think my friend's uncle wrote this! I've always meant to read it, but haven't yet. Thanks for the reminder.

Oh gosh, it lost a couple of my covers. (Or else my page didn't load properly and I'm being redundant... sorry.)

I see your point now, but I stand by my comment just as you stand by yours:

So, you're worried that we might be teaching our kids too much too soon? I for one was thrilled at the notion that they'd teach a concept like "delayed gratification" to a child. It's an abstraction that relates to their lives but it also puts it in their terms.

This is sarcastic, a little bit, right? How much could we learn from any bacteria or microorganisms we found on Mars? How easily might Earth-life contamination wipe that shit out before we learn a thing? There's a chance we've already done it, but if we haven't, maybe we shouldn't?

What would the National Biscuit Company know about cookies OR cakes?

Oh, the concert thing... yeah. Okay, season six musician-not-physicist Daniel Faraday was... yeah. What more proof do you need that Eloise Hawking was right? Her son should not have studied piano.

Yeah, my thought was, he'd obviously fill in the Slynt (or Thorne) role, but you're right, they announced the return of both those men. I can't see "Locke" being the Bowen Marsh character, since Marsh was supposed to grudgingly sorta-support Jon even while bitching and moaning, up until he doesn't, right?

Oh, that's not fair. Jeremy Davies (and Daniel Faraday) are both awesome, even at their worst. Let's at least call Jeremy Davies the thinking man's Corey Feldman and not the poor man's. Good lord, I'm pretty sure Corey Feldman is the poor man's Corey Feldman.

?

In the second book now. There is a tiny bit of "wait, this seems familiar" sequelism, but mostly it's just as much fun as the first, and gets into some really good nuts-n-bolts about how system politics would work and how fragile off world colony ecosystems would be (without ever being boring about those things). I…

Reading book 2 now (actually, Audible audiobook — highly recommend) and I am in love with the reader (Jefferson Mays)'s performance of Avasarala. Her chapters are such joys — and she will be the first character to get changed, alas. Grandmotherly Indian woman who curses like a sailor and doesn't take shit from people?…

Exactly.

Yeah, I'm with you (and Annalee). The only time we'll stop being Space Age is when we're post-Space Age or when we all blow up and get sick and die off. If there's a third option, I'm not sure I believe it.