Favourite Book Dealing With Foreign Culture
What? Shut up! It didn’t say HOW foreign it had to be. I’m choosing super foreign. Like, thousands of years from now and we finally make first contact foreign.
I said shut up.
This book…I’ve had the same copy of this book since I was a freshman in high school, but it probably took me at least 7 tries to get past the first 75 pages.
Why?
Because it made me feel stupid.
I felt like that horribly thought out Barbie, but instead of math, I was complaining about science.
Finally, because I hated myself for having this book sitting on my shelf for ~10 years and because I was tired of it making me feel like a dummy – sitting there, staring at me, daring me to read it so it could continue to laugh at me – I decided that I was going to FINISH. THE. DAMN. THING.
So I did.
And guess what? Less than five pages past the part where I’d given up on it several times in the past, the story got good.
Like, really really effing good. Can’t-put-it-down-read-all-the-time-get-nothing-done good.
So, I know the fact that this is super hard sf is probably offputting to a lot of people (hey, it was to me), but if you can get past all of the DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF HOW THE SPACE SHIPS WORK, you’ll find that it’s a lot of fun, and an interesting take on what could happen when we finally meet that first non-human species.
(Also, one of the scariest book moments I’ve ever had was in this book. I won’t spoil it, but I had to put it down and walk away for a while.)
