Goodreads Choice Awards

"The Goodreads Choice Awards are here again and the results are in. Unfortunately, while there were a ton of great and diverse books to choose from, the winners are, once again, very white."

https://culturess.com/2022/12/09/goodreads-choice-awards-2022-winners-white/?utm_campaign=Culturess+Daily&utm_source=FanSided+Daily&utm_medium=email

Fiction writing

If you’ve ever attended a fiction writing class or listened to a famous author talk about their craft, you’ll quickly learn the importance of opening lines. A perfect opener, the theory goes, will set up scene, character, plot, and tone. If you can do all this in the first paragraph, great. But better still if you can do it all — or at least most of it — in your opening sentence. As Stephen King said, “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” This is the writer’s hook, the way to grab the reader and hold their attention. But not all opening lines are created equal. A Charles Dickens novel might have a first sentence that’s more than 100 words, while a classic of comparative stature might have just three: “Call me Ishmael.” yeremiah@aol.com Yeremiah Hardt

Fortunes Pawn

Book Report: Fortunes Pawn

I began Fortune's Pawn on Thursday January 16, 2020. I finished reading this space novel on Thursday March 5, 2020. It consisted of 320 pages. There are two other parts in this trilogy, Honors Knight and Heaven’s Queen. This book was written in November 2013.

Devi wants to be a Devastator. They go on the best missions and have the best armor and work directly for the king. Devi has made squad captain in less than a year.

"You can't apply to become a Devastor. They ask you."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 4

You cannot apply for anything in life, it all has to be granted to you by the powers you believe create you.

"We might both be from Old Earth, but a century of border wars carries a lot more weight than a shared ancestry from some Dead rock a thousand years ago."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 12

How long does family last. I say forever. Once you are in my family, I will do anything and everything to keep you there.

"Despite being the most populous race in the galaxy, beating out even humans for sheer numbers, the aeons stuck to their own sevalis and their own kind. I'd heard they disliked the other races, with a passion, bordering on violent xenophobia, which was a waste, because they were supposed to be the best navigators in the universe."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 16

Devi saw Rupert the cook and fell in love.

"My equipment is my life; I only buy quality."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 24

"In order to really use Paradoxian armor, you have to activate the neural net."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 25

"As my senses adjustment, my suit my suit became an extension of my own body. I could feel the flow under my armored knees and the slick surface of my suit beneath the artificial surface of my gloves like I was touching it with my own fingers. All my systems flickered on the edge of my thoughts: ammo, power, maps, chat systems, even my vision--were all ready and waiting to flick into my field of vision the second I thought of them."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 26

"It was stupid not to live your life to the fullest when you could die tomorrow."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 28

"Dominance is an animals game. You've got to give the animal part of your enemy time to understand they've been defeated otherwise you'll end up fighting the same fight a dozen times until they get it."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 40

Rupert was holding the captain hostage. Devi shot Rupert. It was an iniation test.

"There are four space-faring races in the galaxy: humans, aeons, legis, and xith'cal. Any of these could be dangerous under the right circumstances, but xith'cal were always dangerous."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 52

 Xith'cal hearing far surpasses humans. The crew had a Xith'cal doctor.

"All languages are but crude translations of the music of the cosmos. We are all of us struggling to speak to true meaning."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 60

"There is no top or bottom in space. We are all exactly where we are meant to be."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 60

"The unity of the Cosmos, we are those who have abandoned the terrestrial to live in harmony with the stars and search for the larger oneness that connects all things."

Nova

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 61

"Whole truth-usually just made things worse, anyway so I avoided them whenever I could."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 67

"The Xith'cal were screeching to one another, a cacophony of calls that sounded more like compcting metal than voices. Then one screech rose over the others, and order began to emerge from the chaos. The Xith'cal divided themselves. Ten began trying to circle Cotter, the obvious threat, the other five went for me."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 69

"There were three known Xith'cal tribes whose hunting grounds touched colonized space, and of them Reapers Fleet was the nastiest. Nastiest, but also furthest away."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 76

"Anything can be a test if you want to make it one."

Rupert

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 80

"Hyperspace was actually the safest place you could be, because when a ship goes into hyperspace it created it's own miniature dimension where it was the only thing that existed. What made jumping dangerous was time, or, more specifically, the time in hyperspace and the time in the real universe."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 83

"It had been the discovery of the hyperspace coil that had gotten humans off Old-Earth. Back then it wasn't uncommon for ships to vanish for years, sometimes even centuries, though their onboard clocks said they'd only been in hyperspace for a day or two. It was called time-dilation, and it was a huge problem."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 83 

"Getting into hyperspace was easy -- all you needed was enough energy of the right kind to jump out of reality, sort of like a fish jumping out of a creek, but the math of landing again at the right place and time was something else entirely. There were millions of variables involved in leaving hyperspace, and an error on any of them could mean coming out decades later than you'd planned to. For centuries this meant only the craziest ships used hyperdrive and everyone else stuck to what they could reach through near lightspeed travel."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 83

"The gates changed everything. They weren't even gates, really. "Gate" implies something you go through, but a hyperspace is nothing but a space-station-sized supercomputer capable of quickly and accurately doing the computations needed for safe jumps. A gate's math guaranteed you'd come out of hyperspace where and, more importantly when you wanted." 

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 83

"Human bodies aren't meant to change dimensions."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 85

"Life and death are equal parts of the universal harmony."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 85

Devi faught Rupert to work on her techniques. Devi couldn't figure out what Rupert was, his fighting technique was unlike anything she'd encountered before.

FWL means Final World Lock. Devi was searching for her captain while she ordered the crew to get back to the ship. Devi was in battle with what appeared to be a shrimp the size of a schoolbus. Devi fought the beast, however no one could find it. They were all going back to the ship.

"I knew something else had happened, something....strange, but I couldn't make my brain pull it up. It was just like a memory that was just floating just on the edge of my consciousness, but every time I reached out, it fitted away. It seemed to want to be forgotten. Gritting my teeth, I tried harder forcing to go over every detail I could recall."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 144

Caldwell wasn't a trader or smuggler.

"Unlike the Paradoxians, who never met a planet they couldn't terraform with bots before they'd even look at it, The Terran Republic is usually very good about cataloging the native life on colonies before they stamp it all out and repopulate with more human-friendly species." 

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 159

"Everyone has plasmex. It's a fundamental force of the universe, like gravity or the strong force inside atoms. Some humans are more sensitive to it than others, especially with daily practice, but everyone has at least a little. Well, biologically speaking, humans and aeons have the least plasmex sensitivity of the known races. Xith'cal have significantly more, and the lelgis are said to hold it as the core of their senses, but please don't let that disturb your harmony. The only thing that truly matters is that we are all connected through plasmex in great oneness that spans the whole of space time. On a universal scale like that, minor biological differences become insignificant."

Nova

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn pp. 165-166

"Remembering the past is impossible when you are one with the universe where time only moves forward."

Ren played chess against herself almost as a compulsion, definitely not for pleasure. She moved both sides so quickly. Devi found Ren frozen in the middle of her playing chess. Rupert just told Devi, Ren doesn't like to be disturbed while playing chess

"Humans and Xith'cal can breathe the same air, but Xith'cal prefer a good deal more arsenic in theirs."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 181

"I'd never seen a Lelgis, living or dead. Most people hadn't.  The Terrans had discovered them seventy years ago when they just appeared out of nowhere with an enormous fleet and demanded tribute. There'd been a brief war, and then some agreement had been struck and the Lelgis had pretty much kept to themselves ever since."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn pp. 181-182

"Xith'cal tribe ship heart is its trees, there death is the tribe's death."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 182

"We fight to eat and challenge, Lelgis are poison,  and they do not fight as we do."

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 183

"Our people lived underground before we were forced into space. Stoneclaw is an old tribe and keeps it's old ways.'

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 183

"The smart Xith'cal choose to be female--they live much longer. Females are also in charge of all sciences and technical aspects of Xith'cal society."

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 184

"Xith'cal eyes don't need the glaring light you humans seem to enjoy."

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 185

Devi got attacked by Xith'cal, because she went on their ship. She thought it was deserted.

"A Xith'cal jaws are it's most powerful weapon, made to crunch through their own steel-hard scales."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 188

Devi was saved from the Xith'cal attack by the black alien from Mycant

"Lelgis don't have genders."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 202

"Bone-knitting was expensive, but down soldiers were even pricer."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 206

"Xith'cal are born genderless. We live in the hatchery until we come of age, doing both male and female work, and then we pick a gender that suits us best. I didn't like either, so I didn't choose."

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 218

"It's not a common thing. Tribe structure is rigid. Everyone has a place. Females are our thinkers, males are our warriors, females run the ships, males hunt. A genderless adult doesn't fit into the established order, so you can see how life could be difficult for those who don't choose."

Hyrek

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 218

"Humans are a backwards sort of species that put one gender before the other. Seeing this, I've found it's much easier to be thought of as male rather than female, especially  looking as I do. And since designation is meaningless to me, I don't see why I shouldn't take the easier choice."

Rachel Bach 

Hyrek Fortune's Pawn p. 219

"There's something about the cold silence of space that helps put your life in perspective."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 233

"A creature was sitting on the ship not three not three feet in front of me. It was small about the size of a large cricket. I wouldn't have noticed it at all against the dark hull if not for the fact the creature glowed a soft blue-white light."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 224

"There is no better cure for a traitorous brain than exercise."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 236

"Love was the last thing I wanted. I had ambition. I had a career ahead of me. Love had ruined careers. It certainly seemed to be ruining mine, but I didn't know what to do about it. I felt helpless, like I just took a sucker punch for a fight I hadn't know I was in, and that made me feel more murderous than anything else. Nothing pisses me off like being weak."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 257

"Devi saw another bug, glowed  with the same blue-white light shining like a star shining in the darkened lounge, a long tail covered in a short glowing fuzz extended from one side and moved with tiny flicks propelling the creature through the air from her."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 264

"Most people's aura's are too faint too see much, but some are brighter. They change all the time, though, growing and shifting colors as the person changes."

Nova

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 266-267

"The universe is filled with phenomena beyond our compression. It's part of what makes life so beautiful."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 267

"It's awful the way some attack people who seek knowledge."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 268

"We could terraform planets and jump ships through dimensions, but no one had ever mastered real-time communication across the universe."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 271

"I did some checking with a contact who knows about this kind of thing, and he believes the scaled figure you described is a Terran weapon called a symbiont. They were used against us in the Border Wars, but the Terrans supposedly destroyed them all decades because of their extreme instability. Thanks to that, our info is a bit out of date, but I can tell you that symbionts are alien parasites, created in a lab and put into a human host."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn pp.  271-272

"Since we never caught a symbiont  alive to test, we don't know they're incredibly strong, fast, and damn near unkillable. They can also switch back and forth between the thing you described and their old human body. Don't let that fool you, though. Symbionts are not human. If you've really seen a symbiont, Devi, I need you to let me know right away. If the Terrans are breaking their treaties, I have to report it to the king's office immediately."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 272

Cotter died fighting symbionts

"There are things is this universe we do not understand. Things we cannot see, cannot detect, and yet they could wipe us out, all of us without even noticing we were here."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 288

"Phantoms and technology don't get along."

Brenton

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 289

"Phantoms break what we know about the rules of normal space. They move through the universe seemingly without a care for gravity, distance and they're attracted to habitable planets. Leave one there long enough and the whole planet starts to crumble." 

Brenton

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 289 

"The Lelgis are creatures of almost pure plasmex. Their drones are disposable, they don't fear guns or ships and even the Xith'cal don't raid them. They've had nothing to fear in the whole of their history, so why are they so afraid now? What are the Xith'cal doing?"

Brenton

Rachel Bach 

Fortune's Pawn p. 294-295

"Xith'cal are brilliant bioengineers."

Brenton

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 295

"They've changed their own race countless times over the centuries, increasing their senses by a factor of ten, making themselves immune to every disease and specializing the genders so intensely that male and female Xith'cal are almost separate species. Controlled evolution, their females call it, but Stoneclaw is a tricky old girl. Her tribe focuses on biological weapons. I think Stoneclaw was building something on the ship. Something that could threaten even a Velgis hive mind."

Brenton

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 295

"Trauma shells surround you body in a field that slows your body down to nothing. That might not sound so bad, but the reality is that you feel like your constantly on the edge of suffocating. Plus, they're dark. Being in one made me think of being buried alive, though I usually had drugs to get me through."

Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn p. 311

Rupert took Devis memories to save both her life and the crew.

Rupert put her in a trauma shell.

When Hyrek released her she saw Rupert talking with Caldwell and felt anger and pain but didn't know why.

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

I began this novel on Tuesday March 15, 2022. I completed it Friday September 2, 2022. It has 475 pages. It was published in 1989 by Del Rey Trade Paperback.

"The Consulate and Home Rule Council flatlined us three standard weeks ago with the news that the Time Tombs showed signs of opening. The antientropic field around them were expanding rapidly and the shrike has begun firing as far south as the Bridal Range."

Hyperion p. 4

"A FORCE space task force was immediately dispatched from Parvati to evacuate the Hegemony citizens on Hyperion before the Time Tombs opened. There time-debt will be a little more than three Hyperion years. We do not know if the evacuation fleet will arrive in time. But the situation is even more complicated. An Ouster migration cluster of at least four thousand...units...has been detected approaching the Hyperion system. Our evacuation task force should arrive only a short while before the Ousters."

Medina Gladstone

Hyperion pp. 4-5

"The FORCE joint chiefs believe that this is the Ousters big push. Whether they seek to control Hyperion just for the Time Tombs or weather this is an all-out attack on the world-wide remains to be seen. In the meantime, a full FORCE: space battle fleet complete with farcaster battalion has spun up from the Comn system: to join the evacuation task force, but this fleet may be recalled depending upon circumstances."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 5

"Oh yes, we were challenged the moment we tunneled down from the quantum leap. A hegemony warship is escorting us this very moment."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 11

"Treeships rarely occurred more than a four-or five-month timedebt, making short scenic crossings where star systems were a few light years apart, thus allowing their passengers to spend as little time as necessary in fogue. For the Treeship to make the trip to Hyperion and back, accumulating six years of Web time with no paying passengers would mean a financial loss to the Templars."

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 11-12

"There is no death in all the universe. No smell of death, moan, moan, moan, Cybele, moan, for thy pernicious Babes, have changed a God into a shaking palsy, moan, brethren, moan for I have no strength left; weak as read-weak-feeble as my voice-Oh no the pain, the pain of feebleness, moan, moan, for still I throw..."

Martin Silenus

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 16

"I was baptized a Lutheran, a subset which no longer exists, I helped create a Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationalist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a duelspaying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now I am happy to say I am a simple pagan."

Martin Silenus

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 20

"Among us we represent Islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece of a puzzle no one has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion. It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is too be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glamour of understanding but failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice."

Weintraub

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 21-22

"Father Paul Dure certainly would have become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with sharp experience to hide their pain, Paul Dure was a follower of St. Teilhara as well an archeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian. Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted into a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Dure lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostle Church continued to be humankind's last best hope for immortality."

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 25-26

"The bishopic on Pacum had not mentioned any history of Catholicism on Hyperion, much less the presence of a cathedral. It is almost inconceivable that the scattered seedship colony of four centuries ago could have supported a large enough congregation to warrant the presence of a bishop, much less a cathedral."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 33

Father Dure performed a ritual for no reason, and almost stopped when he saw a woman in his audience. The woman was blind.

"I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim Mosques in town, but the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiber plastic shipments from the south and Shreik Cult temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet wreaks of mysticism without revaluation."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 34

Father Hoyt performed a service for a dying man on the street.

"Ain't going to be no flame trees this far down. If there was the forest sure as hell wouldn't look like this. You got to get up in the Pinions before you see a tesla. We ain't out of the rainforest yet, Pedre." Old Kady

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 40

Father Hoyt was taken care of by Semfa, but as he was saying goodbye, he could see she was sad. He blessed her and kissed her on the forehead.

They see a Phoenix being cooked alive by a massive electric storm that's taking place on Hyperion.

"The Cleft was not carved out of the rising plateau as the Legendary Grande Canyon on Old Earth or World Croak on Hebron. In spite of its active oceans and seemingly Earthlike continents, Hyperion is tectonically quite dead, more like Mars, Lusus, or Armaghast in total lack of continent drift. And like Mars and Lusus, Hyperion is afflicted with Deep Ice Ages, although here the periodicity is spread to thirty-seven years by the long eclipse of the currently ambient white dwarf."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 46

"Mist rose from the unforeseen rumblings to the rivers far below, spray raising in shifting curtains of mist to multiply the settling sun into a dozen violet spheres and twice that many rainbows. I watched as each spectrum was born, rose toward the darkening dome of the sky and died. As the cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns of plateau and the warm air rushed skyward, pulling leaves, twigs, and mist upward in a vertical gale, a sand ebbed up out of the Cleft as if the continent itself was calling with voices of stone giants, gigantic bamboo flutes, church organs the size of palaces. The clear, perfect notes ringing from the shrillest soprano to the deepest base, and speculated on wind vectors against fluted rock walls. On caverns far below venting deep cracks in motionless crust, and the illusion that human voices that random harmonics can generate. But in the end, I set aside speculation and simply listened as the craft sang its farewell hymn to the Sun."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 47

They had a data sphere at Pacum to help them communicate. Tuk, their guide, was killed by bandits in his sleep.

"Even fear fades and becomes commonplace after days of anticlimax."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 50

"The Zen Gnostics would say that emptiness is a good sign, that it presages openness to a new level of awareness, new insights, new experiences."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 51

Father Hoyt met the Bikuru, who were natives to Hyperion. They carried no weapons, and didn't say a word. They had no facial hair whatsoever. Their skin was a tad yellower than human skin from the environment.

"The more I learn the less I understand."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 57

Father Paul Hoyt tries to trade with the Bikuru, but they don't understand and discard the objects, and go back to their talks in their huts. The trinkets he gives them are littered. They won't let him examine them. They don't even have recognizable names. They do not eat meat regularly because of its availability. They haven't been able to hunt, so they eat the dead animals.

"Each new revaluation adds to my confusion."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 60

The Bikuru kept their population at 70, the same number of survivors recorded on the Dropship 400 years ago. When someone dies, they procreate to replace and nothing more. The Bikuru had no more than ten-year age difference. The Bikuru had no more than a ten-year age difference between them.

"I ran my hand over the deeply cut fold of ornamental carvings around the door, smooth. Everything had been smoothed and worn by time, even here, hidden from the elements by the protective lip of the overhang. How many thousands of years had this...temple... been covered into the south wall of the Cleft?"

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 67

"Four meters high, three meters wide carved in old style of the elaborate crucifixes of Old Earth, the cross faced that stained-glass wall as if awaiting the sun and explosion of light that would ignite the inlaid diamond, sapphires, blood crystals, lapis beads, queens’ tears, onyxes, and other precious stones that I could make out in the light of the flash light as I approached."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 68-69

The Bikuru burnt all the fathers’ tapes, notes and com logs because he accidentally exposed himself.

"There are planetary archaeo-historians who devote their lives to the study of labyrinths."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 76

"Labyrinthine worlds are always Earthlike, at least 7.9 on the Sol-mev Scale, always circling a G-type star, and yet always restricted to worlds that are tectonically dead, more like Mars than Old Earth. The tunnels themselves are set deep--usually a minimum of ten kilometers but often as deep as thirty--and they catacomb the crust of the planet."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 76

Father Hoyt had met the Shrike and he survived.  Now he was treated as a holy man among the Bikuru. The cruciform which had been implanted in Father Hoyt was his own creation. The Bikuru are sexless.

"I now understand the reason for faith --pure, blind, fly-in-the-face of-reason faith as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of the universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small reasoning beings that inhabit it."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 89

The Consul and his party were taken from a bar by a blue android.

"For more than a century it had been illegal to own androids on Hegemony and none have been bio factored for about that long, but they were still used for manual labor in remote parts of the backwater, non-colony worlds like Hyperion. The Shrike temple had used androids extensively complying with the church of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed that androids were free from original Sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind and--incidentally--exempt from the Shrieks terrible and inevitable retribution."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 113

Fedman Kassad found himself in a simulation, but didn't know who was real are part of the program.

Again, it was in the final hours of OCS: HTN simulation. By then Kassad had learned that the exercises were something more than simulations. The OCS: HTN was part of the World Web. All thing, the real-time network which governed Hegemony politics, fed information to tens of billions of data hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of action my and consciousness all of its own. More than a hundred and fifty planetary data spheres mingled their resources within the framework. Created by six thousand Omega class AIs to allow the OCS: HTN to function."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 129

"Qom-Riyadh was by its own choice and the accident of its distant location, a technologically primitive world. But the inhabitants were not so primitive. Nor were the revolutionary mullahs who led the invasion so imposed to the "Great Satan of Hegemony Science" that they refused to lie into the global data net with their personal comlogs."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 135

"The Ousters had been the single external threat to the Hegemony for the four centuries since the Barbarian Hordes had left the Sol system in their crude fleet of leaking O'Neil cities, tumbling asteroids and experimental comet clusters. Even the Ousters acquired the Hawking Drive, it remained official Hegemony policy to ignore them as long as their swarms stayed in the darkness between the stars and limited their in-system pondering from gas giants and water ice to uninhabited moons."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 158

 

Kassad met Moneta on Hyperion, he had dreams about her before they met at the city of Poets near the Time Tombs.

 

"The Time Tides drive the tombs backward through time."

Hyperion Dan Simmons

Moneta p. 162

"The essence of honor lay in the moment between equals." Kassad

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 165

Kassad and Moneta used the powers that the Time Tombs gave them. As they saw a battle, they saw each bloody victim as well as victor. However, they couldn't do more than defend themselves against the Shrike.

 

Kassad met Moneta in the past which was his future, because of the Time Tombs. Kassad and Moneta make love amongst the dead of Hyperion. Kassad told Hoyt he would kill Moneta the net time he saw her.

 

They were going to Naiad, but found that it was destroyed mysteriously. So they were traveling to another city.

"From my earliest sense of self, I know that I would be--should be-- a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all around breathed it's last breathed in me, and commanded me that I be doomed to play with words for the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our races thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So, what the hell, I became a poet."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 182

"Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acrid test of publication is as naïve and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 184

"The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combination of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity of what is perceived and remembered."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 187

"For all our talk of expansion and pioneering spirit we all know how stultified and our human universe has become. We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revaluation; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where it once leapt in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable -- and operable: --to our great-grandfathers."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 187

"Words are the most supreme objects. They are minded things."

William Gass

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 188

"And so, they are. As pure and transcendent as any ideas which ever cast a shadow into Plato's dark cave of our perception. But there are also pitfalls of deceit and misperceptions. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack objectivity distortion of reality which language brings. Example: The Chinese pictogram for honesty is a two-part symbol of a man standing next to his word."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 188

"Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it."

Bertrand Russell

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 189

"Poets are mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become. Words are the only bullets in the truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

George Wu

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 189

"Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily it is about truth."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 190

Mother died using Flashback, a drug that made you hallucinate. That is why I only used it twice.

"A person constantly busy accessing makes a pitiful sight in public."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 197

"No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought processor ordering and expressing revelations flowing from somewhere else."

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 204-205

"King Billy love and appreciates fine music but cannot produce it. A connoisseur of ballet and all things graceful, his Highness is a klutz, a movement of prattfalls and comic bits of clumsiness. A passionate reader, unnearing poetry critic and patron of forensics, King Billy provides a stutter in his verbal expression with a shyness which will not allow him to show his verse or prose to anyone else."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 205

"A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the Pagan mystery."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 212

"At first we think the missing are merely absent; there are no watchers on the walls of our city, no walls actually, no warriors at the door of our mead hall. Then a husband reports a wife who disappears between the evening meal and the tucking in of their two children."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 214

 

"The Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement that comes from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 221

Martin burned his cantos to save King Billy

"In hopelessness there is always hope."

Het Masteen

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 233

Sol dreamt that he had to kill his daughter Rachel on Hyperion. He chose to ignore it. Rachel got on a medic ship because she was aging backwards. Rachel's ex Melio came to visit Sol. Sol asked a bishop of the Time Tombs for assistance with Rachal's condition, but was denied and told that she was the chosen one of the non-believers.

"The essence of human experience lay not primarily in peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red in old calendars, but, rather in the unself-conscious flow of little things-the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuits, their crossings and connections casual dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal."

Sarai

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 282-283

"After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of the ethical system, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable, conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior towards an innocent human being was evil."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 290

Sarai died.

"Hope is good, sometimes it is all we're given."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 305

"Cybrids are a different matter. Tailored from human genetic stock, they are far more human in appearance and outward behaviors than androids are allowed to be. Agreements between the Technocore and the Hegemony allow only a handful of cybrids to be in existence."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 328

"Unlike a human personality which can...I believe the consciousness is...be destroyed at death, my own consciousness cannot be terminated. Therefore was, however as a result of the assault, an interruption. Although I possessed...an... shall we say duplicate recording of memories, personality, etcetera, there was a loss. Some data was destroyed in the attack. In that sense, the assailant committed murder."

Johnny

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 329

"AIDS II was a human plague disease long before Hegira. It disabled the immune system. This virus works the same with AI."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 332

"There are quasi-family arrangements but they share none of the requirements of emotions or responsibilities that human families exhibit. AI "families" are primarily convenient code groups for showing where certain processing trends originated."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 335

“AIs are pursing the evolution of pursuing the evolution of consciousness on a galactic scale.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 341

Cybrids are being recycled.

“Worrying about AI's turning on us is about as productive as worrying that Farm animals are going to revolt.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 342

“The persona template becomes self-aware…I don’t mean just self-aware, like you and me, but self-aware that it’s an artificially self-aware persona—and that leads to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic labyrinths that go into Escher-space.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 342

“With the Hawking Drive humankind had explored, colonized and linked with forecaster worlds across many thousands of light-years. But no one had tried to reach the exploding Core Sun’s. We had barely crawled out of one spiral arm The Hercules Cluster.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 366

“May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a stout or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a superior being our reasoning may take the same tone through enormous they may be fine—This is the very thing which consists poetry.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 370

“The colonies of the world have limited dataspheres. While there is some contact with the Technocore via transmissions, it's an exchange of data only…. rather like the first Information Age computer interfaces…. rather than a flow of consciousness. Hyperion datasphere is primitive to the point of non-existence. And from what I can access, the core has no access whatsoever with that world.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 382

“Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave,

A paradise for a sect, the savage too

From froth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf, The shadows of melodious utterance. But bare of laurel they live, dream, and dye; For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save

Imagination from the sable charm

And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet—mayst not tell thy dreams’? Since every man whose soul is not clod. Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, and been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purposed to release

Be Poet's or Fanatics will be known when this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 363-364

“The Technocore has been divided into three groups for as long as the core existed.  The stables are the old-line AI, some of them dating back to pre-mistakes days; at least one of them gained sentience in The First Information Age. The stables argue that a certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core. They've project as a way to avoid rash decisions to delay until all variables can be factored.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 365

Johnny died on Hyperion going to a Shrike Temple with Brawne to try and make him human. The authorities revoked Brawnie's license and swept the whole incident under the rug.

“The day is gone, and all are sweet are gone!

Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hands, and softer breast,

Warm breath, light whisper, tender simple tone,

Bright eyes, accomplished shape and languorous waist!

Faded the flower and all its bedded charms,

Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,

Faded the shape of beauty from my arms.

Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—vanished unseasonably at shut of eve, when the dusk holiday—or holinight Of fragrant curtainalace begins to weave the worst of the darkness thick, for hid delights;

But, as I’ve read love's missiles though today,

He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

The living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So, haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So, in my veins red life might stream again, And though be conscious—calmed see here it is—I hold it towards you.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 408-409

Brawnie is pregnant with Johnny’s child.

“I think one begins to feel when things aren’t important. I’m not sure how to put it. When you’ve spent about years entertaining rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you’ve had half that number of years experience. You know what the room and people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it’s not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn’t and how little time there is to learn the difference.” Siri

Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 431-432

“The Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 467

“The Ousters understand time tides, the antientropic fields surrounding the Tombs. They could not generate such a field, but they could shield against them—theoretically—collapse them. The Time Tombs and all their content would cease to age backward. The Tombs would “open.” The Shrike would slip its tether, no longer connected to the vicinity of the Tombs. Whatever else was inside would now be freed."

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 469

“It no longer matters who considers themselves the master of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”

Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 470

On their way to the Shrike temple, they started singing “We’re off to see the Wizard,” from The Wizard of Oz.

 

Reality Check

I started this book on Saturday September 3, 2022. I finished reading this on Tuesday September 20, 2022. It has 330 pages. It is by Peter Abrahams.

Clea gave Cody one of her father's shirts because his got soaked from the rain. The shirt was monogrammed and made specifically for him in Europe. Clea is leaving for Hong Kong for the summer because her father found her and Cody together in her room and also because she got a B in one of her classes.

Cody bought Clea Jade earrings as a welcome home gift. Clea was now going to a boarding school in Vermont.

Cody broke up with Clea. Cody was being scouted by Penn State than got injured. Cody dropped out of school. Clea went missing. She mailed Cody a letter the same day she went missing. Cody took it too her parents house. Her father passed out when he showed him the letter, because he blamed Cody for her disappearance.

Cody went to Vermont to look for Clea. He told his father he was looking for a job out of town. On the way, Cody visited his mother's gravesite. She died of bone cancer. He left his spare football.

Cody joined the search for Clea. He went to where they were handing out search assignments saw her horse. He started walking up the mountain, in search for Clea.

Cody asked a waitress where a reasonable hotel was, she told him. Before he got out he decided to chase after a pickup truck and got lost. He eventually got to his motel. He stayed in room 11, his favorite number.

"Attitude always ends up being a hundred times more important than experience." Mrs. McTeague Reality Check p. 112

Cody would make it his mission to find Clea, even though the town called off the search for her. That's why he got the job on the grounds.

Sergeant Orten found Cody with Bud out on the snow searching for Clea. Cody revealed to Orten that he loved Clea after punching him in the face. Sergeant Orten made Cody his mole to catch Clea.

Bending

Clea Weston

Water above, heavy and dead,

Black Rocks all around

And I am down here holding my breath,

Trophy kid comes to this.

He swims to me in smiling bubbles

Twisting between my legs and up my back and around my neck

"A little bending, nothing to fear my dear."

Oh temptation?

Far above--is there air still, still air?-- wet burial layer heavy and dead. Don't go."

Reality Check p. 210

"Wealth never stops circulating, and all you have to do is tap into the flow like a maple sugar farmer." 

Simon 

Reality Check p. 216

Someone killed Bud, Clea horse. Cody found Clea's cell phone got her messages and saw her pictures.

Officer Brand was taking off the case. Sending him back home. Giving him a payoff. Cody made pretend he was leaving, but returned when Brand was away.

Cody found Clea in a barn. He rescued her from Sargeant Orten and Big Len.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Grim Grotto

11th book

By Lemony Snicket

I began March 5, 2021 and completed it on Wednesday March 14, 2021. This novel is by Lemony Snicket. It has 323 pages.

Sunny, Violet and Klaus Bauldare were marooned from an Island from a storm. They were adrift in a taboggon. A submarine saved them. They were in Captain Widdershins sub.

"He who hesitates is lost."

A Series of Unfortunate Events p. 33

They met Fiona, the captains step daughter.

"The amount of treachery in this world is enormous, and the best we could do is one noble thing."

A Series of Unfortunate Events p. 59

Another sub was after them. It was in the shape of an octopus with a metal dome for a head. Another sub rescued them. Klaus may have figured out why the sugar bowl is important, but not where it is.

"The poisons of some deadly fungus can be the source of some wonderful medicines."

A Series of Unfortunate Events p. 106

They were in a cave and they found lights that spelled out "VFD"

Then they found themselves trapped in a cave by mushrooms. They waited until the mushrooms went back or wanned until they left. They arrived to an empty sub. They found a poisonous mushroom in Sunny's helmet.

The submarine was about to be intercepted by Count Olafs sub. Count Olaf took the kids to the brig where they met the hooked henchman which was Fiona's brother.

Fiona and her brother and the children were now on a mission to save Sunny. Sunny was saved by the Wasabi in place of Horseradish. She gave the Wasabi to Klaus back in the cave.

"Reading poetry, even if you are only reading it to find a secret message hidden within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who bought an umbrella on a rainy day, or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage. With each poem the children felt more and more powerful--or they might have said in their food code more and more wasabi--and by the time the two volunteers were interrupted they felt as if the tables just might have been continuing to turn."

A Series of Unfortunate Events p. 270-271

The children had to stick a porthole with gum and glue it back in place. They saw a creature not known to them. Mr. Poe awaited their arrival on Briny Beach. However they got into a taxi, which was driven by Kit Snickett.

MASH

One of the most beloved TV sitcoms of all time, M*A*S*H follows the antics and exploits of a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea during the Korean War of 1950–53. With its unique combination of comedy and wartime drama, M*A*S*H managed to make audiences laugh and cry. It was both incredibly popular and critically acclaimed, picking up 14 Emmy Awards during its 11-year run on CBS (from 1972 to 1983). The series finale remains the most-watched scripted episode in U.S. television history, viewed by an incredible 60.2% of American households. M*A*S*H introduced us to a collection of colorful characters. Over its 11 seasons, we grew to love Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce (Alan Alda), Captain Trapper John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers), and Captain B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell). For a situation comedy, the characters were surprisingly complex, demonstrating real growth from one season to the next. The setting, meanwhile, gave M*A*S*H extra depth. The series took place during the Korean War, but first aired during the Vietnam War. The writers and producers had to tread carefully with their antiwar message — they were allowed to comment on war, but not directly protest against it. Still, the message was clear to viewers. As Hawkeye said, “War isn't hell. War is war, and hell is hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.” Here are some of the most classic lines from M*A*S*H, ranging from straight-out gags to surreal remarks, to the more heartfelt lines that gave the series its special, lasting appeal.yeremiah@aol.com Yeremiah Hardt

Family Unity: Thoughts about Encanto

Family unity is one of the greatest magical powers. For this, it is possible to adapt within your circle to make it stronger and more powerful. This is portrayed within the movie Encanto in many ways. Encanto is about a family that has power, however it does not last until they open their doors and share it with the town in which they reside. I believe this is true in all instances, if we don't share what we have and squander it on ourselves, the gifts we have go, when we go however if we open ourselves up and take a chance on the unknown, we may be surprised with how open and honest others can be with us.