Books!

[Róisín]

LooNEY, could you possibly elaborate more on that explanation? I don’t quite understand what you mean, unless it is something like Kipling’s:

‘There are thousands of laws legislators have spoken
A handful the Creator sent.
The former are being continually broken.
The latter can’t even be bent.’

I had thought ‘prove’ in this context signified something like ‘test’?

[Maglor]

Title: Roadside picnic
Author: Strugatsky brothers
Genre: sci-fi
Description: ther's a place on Earth, heavily touched by allien activity. Alliens are long gone, but they left some artifacts behind, so "The Zone" became a Klondike for military, scientists and so called "Stalkers". This is a story of one of them.
If you ever wanted to know, what's the source of "S.T.A.L.K.E.R" game series, what Tarkovsky tried to say in on of his big movies, and why every wastelender is called Stalker over all the CIS, this book is for you)

[Róisín]

Maglor, that sounds like an interesting book. A lot of story could grow out of that premise!

[LooNEY_DAC]

LooNEY, could you possibly elaborate more on that explanation? I don’t quite understand what you mean, unless it is something like Kipling’s:

‘There are thousands of laws legislators have spoken
A handful the Creator sent.
The former are being continually broken.
The latter can’t even be bent.’

I had thought ‘prove’ in this context signified something like ‘test’?

As a rule, humans have two ears.
Exception that proves the rule: my grandpa had one ear after his cancer surgery; thus since it was removed, he had two to begin with.
If a law (as in the laws of physics) has exceptions, it isn’t a law.
Laws are prescriptive (or proscriptive); rules are descriptive (as a rule).

[Róisín]

Gotcha. I think I now understand what you are getting at. The main difficulty is how the precise meaning of words drifts and changes over time. Ah, English!

[thorny]

One explanation I've seen:

If only some things are known about a time and place, it may be unclear what was the rule, that is, either what was the usual behavior or what was the (human) law.

If you then find a piece of info that's clearly making an exception, that tells you that the rule must have existed.

A sign that says 'everyone must leave their weapons at the door!' proves that it was common for people to be carrying weapons outside the door, and also proves that sometimes they brought them indoors. If nobody carried weapons, or if it was automatic that they were always left at the door, there would have been no need for such a sign. And so on.

So the saying still wouldn't mean 'exceptions prove that the rule was correct'. It means 'the existence of someone making an exception to a rule proves that the rule must have existed.'

And yes it only works with human rules; we're not going to find a sign reading 'warning! no gravity inside this establishment!' -- at least, not unless we find it in a space station. And if we did, it would prove that they'd had some means of providing effective up-and-down-ness in the rest of the station.

[Róisín]

thorny, that makes excellent sense! Thank you. Also in logic exercises I have encountered the phrase ‘probatum est’ (meaning, I think, something like ’it is proven’ or ‘tested’, as in the ‘proof of an equation or an experiment’ when such an interaction of rules and exceptions has been demonstrated?

Also, anent books, a friend has given me a copy of one of Rosanne Hawke’s other books: ‘Wolf Child’, which is a book for older children and young adults, an historical fantasy covering the inundation of Lyonnesse. It is a story about survivors of that flood, and one of the survivors is a child peripheral to the story of Tristan and Isolde. Good book if you like Cornish history and folklore, which I do, some of the Tasmanian and Bass Strait Islands branch of my family having come from there. She is a good and interesting writer whose work I will definitely share with the children I know!

[Crumpite]

Ok, I'll toss one in the pot: Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks.
A hard SiFi novel that's quite a challenge to read !
The protagonist of the story has a bit of brain damage or was just wired differently at birth and can only write phonetically, hence the title.
Most of the population of earth has left to voyage to other stars and in the meantime the solar system is drifting into a molecular cloud which will dim the sun enough to extinguish all life.
Big concepts everywhere and much isn't spelled out so a bit of thought is needed to piece together the story.
I'll be reading more of his SiFi as soon as I scrape up some time and cash !

I usually only read SiFi, fantasy and gothic horror.
I've been mining the old pulp magazines available in the internet archives for old gold lately...

[Róisín]

Crumpite, I do like the work of Iain Banks. Well worth a read. And pulp gold on the internet? Do you have a website for that? My Star loves the old pulps, and at present he has way too much leisure to read while he is in hospital. He and I used to have a large collection of pulps, most of which has been lost over many housemoves, so finding some of that stuff again would be a delight!

[Jitter]

Many of Iain M. Banks’ works are great! Always thought provoking, but some of them are too complicated for me There is (at least) one where the characters are the Minds of the big ships (human population in the millions) and that went completely over my head May have been Inversions. My favorite is Against a Dark Background.

Róisín, note that while Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks are in fact the same person, the former is the author of mainstream or contemporary fiction while the SciFi is written by the latter

Hard SciFi that doesn’t explain: the Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. May be worth a try!

[Crumpite]

Róisín,
I think the best jumping off point is:
http://.gwthomas.org/frank-belknap-long-part-one-1920-1939/
This lists a bunch of Long's fiction in the archives and from there you can jump to many other pages that link to even other sites. Yell if you need more detail...
If you are a Hodgeson fan this site has *many* derivative works by professional authors that have been published in book form:
https://nightland.website/index.php
Excellent stuff ! Creepy as all get out 😱
I've more if need be.
Enjoy, and I hope this entertains Star.

[Maglor]

I recently discovered Ivan Efremow. A good-old hard sci-fi again.
But there's a thing about his books.
First of all: some ideologicaly sensitive readers might dislike Efremov for putting his stories in a decorations of a distant comunistic utopia.
Second is a thing I've had to realize in order to start actually like Efremov: his novels are only pretend to be fiction, while it's actually a philosophical treatises. His heroes are so well-speaking, so healthy and so much like antique statues (especially Fy Rodis) you just don't feel them as a living human-beings. Percept the as ideas is all that's left, and boy is he good at that!
Shortly: Ivan Efremov is like Ayn Rand, but for comunism.

[Opaque]

Ah, well. I haven't read alot of books recently but  I would recommend The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Then again I'm a nerd. I remember liking Tithe and Valiant as an edgy teen. Odd Tomas too. These are fairly old books but just what popped into my mind.

[Crumpite]

Drat, that link didn't work, let's try it again:
http://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/frank-belknap-long-part-one-1920-1939/

Aaand post it...

[tzelly]

I can recommend a number of good authors, but my personal top has to be Brian Sanderson. His weaving of fantasy worlds and their own individual hard magic systems are absolutely inspiring. Most of his resent work go into very long series so a good place to start is his one off Warbreaker. Its shorter then his normal novel at around 500 pages instead of well over a thousand.