Powered armor may enhance speed and strength and keep you from being vaporized instantly, but each drop may kill you. Usually there is a rota and limits on the number of missions: but the record-keeping machine slips up and one soldier is sent down over and over and over again, and survives. The setting is more or less cribbed from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but the emotional core of the book is the leeching away of hope and humanity, the numbness and burn-out of war. Plot twists and a strange, disconnected coda round out the story.
If you have read and enjoyed Sandman or Good Omens you know what to expect from American Gods and you will not be disappointed. If you have not read Gaiman, this is a particularly good novel to start with. Gaiman is a terrific storyteller, and writes mythological figures as characters, as people. Kevin Crossley-Holland does the same thing in his Norse Myths.
Formal theory of planning and action, with practical application to animations and games. Theory seems similar to Reiter’s work.
I think this short story is the best approximation of a truly alien mindset that I’ve read. The middle third of Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves also embeds you deeply and sympathetically in an alien culture, but in the end you can understand Asimov’s aliens. Carr’s aliens remain alien, and the story is both unsettling and exciting.
The story can be read at lexel.net.
In an alternate future in which the Méxica (Aztecs) and the Japanese rule an interstellar empire, the light cruiser Cornuelle carries a Company team and an Imperial shaman/political officer to Ephesus to rescue a stranded archaeological team which has uncovered dangerous relics of a long-lost hi-tech civilization… good space opera, decent characters, and the usual pleasant unfamiliarity of alternate history.
I like alternate history when the point is to show that some of the things we take for granted weren’t inevitable, but I think this story could have been told without the added conceit, by constructing a future culture that included all the elements he wanted to adopt from Aztec culture. Still, Harlan’s extrapolation of Aztec society to technological imperium feels consistent and believable.
(addendum July 2020: “Aztech Nights” in Alan Moore’s Tom Strong #3 from July 1999 has an alternate-world technologically advanced Aztec empire the worships a sentient AI in the form of Quetzalcoatl conducting an expansionist war across dimensions.)
Albums: Era of Queens, Best of, Eternal
Origa was a Russian singer who worked in Japan, creating sound-tracks for many Anime.
Mathematical and computer graphical exploration of some beautiful fractals deriving from Klein’s work on the interactions between certain kinds of spiral motion. Lovely images, nice mathematics (geometry and complex numbers) and computer code.