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 :)
The east lemmy remained plentiful—alarmingly, it became more nutritious, another mystery I should have been able to explain but could not. The west lemmy rotted on reddit. Uri toiled in the fields as if he could work out his grief through his hands and his tears through irrigation water from a spring between our fields and the west lemmy. We had planted a second crop, a yamlike tuber, and I prayed it would remain safe to eat.
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.
Intelligence wastes itself on animals and their trammeled, repetitive lives. They mature, reproduce, and die faster than pines, each animal equivalent to its forebearer, never smarter, never different, always reprising their ancestors, never unique. Yet with more intelligence, less control. The mindless root fungus never fails, but moth messengers come and go with seasons, larger animals grow immune to addictions, and the first foreigners, who built the city, abandoned it and me without explanation or motive just as we had begun to communicate. Did they discover my nature and flee, or was their nature renegade?
[...]
I would have died without these new foreigners, I will die without them, but I have seen that intelligence makes animals unstable.
I must communicate with them and finally I have the strength. I am growing a root to store what I learn, but it now contains little more than pith. I have not tapped their intellect and used it like phosphates.
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.
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 ;)
@troyunrau For now, I'll reveal that I heard of the book in the podcast Daniel And Jorge Explain The Universe. Occasionally, they interview authors of interesting Science Fiction books. You can see a list of those interview episodes by going to https://sites.uci.edu/danielandjorge/djeu-episode-catalog/ and Ctrl-F for "Science Fiction".
PS: Daniel Whiteson is a physics professor at UC Irvine and was/is(?) involved at CERN as an experimental particle physicist, Jorge Cham is a cartoonist.
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.
“Because it wasn’t in the news. A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Lemmy, for the managers . . . and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’ Do you know what Lemmy needs most?”
“More ice.”
“A new system that does not bottleneck through one channel. Our friend Lemmy is our greatest danger.”
It’s definitely political science fiction. But perhaps it would help if I told you one of the “Lemmy” replacements was the proper noun “Luna” --> Do you know what Luna needs most?
For instance, on the planet Lemmy, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, Lemmy, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
“Long ago, Lemmy had stood at the void edge of Mount Lemmy. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Lemmy’s eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Lemmy, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to see? Now he reaffirmed that decision.”
I do not know this one. So I begin meandering, like a river ;)
It feels space opera. “void edge” and “void space” evoke megaconstructions, but the void here is white, not black. So it could also be some sort of different physics, like in Baxter’s Raft. Or it could be something like the shell world in Banks’s Matter. Could be something like Hamilton’s Void Trilogy – but I don’t remember the void being white.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Lemmy.
Add comment