(Part 2) Best products from r/hfy

More to come, that in my opinion will be better from myself.

However, I can recommend some stuff I like.

Don't need to know anything about Mass Effect for, Transcendent Humanity. and Mass Effect end of Days. Both very HFY and Free!


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Some other stuff I like but not quite as free, so do your research!

Seven Eves - A little depressing and somewhat long winded, characters act a little too stupidly at times in my opinion but interesting none the less.

House of Suns - An exploration of Deep Time and the segmentation / division of minds and consciousness like what I was exploring with Arik and will be a large focus of my future writing. So fun to play with the concept of 'me'.

The Bobiverse - Von Nuemann eat your heart out. This one explores similar themes of consciousness and thought with regards to AI.
Spinward Fringe - It's long if you want something that doesn't leave you hanging, and the first one is free! Jumps around and suffers from what I call the 'LitRPG' syndrome without being in the genre itself, IE characters quickly gaining power and handling it almost perfectly. This only happens once so I can tolerate the lack of exposition.

hmm, that's about all I can recommend off the top of my head. Sorry for leaving you hanging on this. I do want to come back to it, but the serial format was doing my head in. Plots were unwraveling and I was writing into corners.

/u/hewholooksskyward

Your bono-fides and progenitors are starting to show here.. :)

I'm starting to read references and connections to the following:

1. Wing Commander, the games
   
   
2. The Wing commander Extended Universe book series, specifically this book: https://www.amazon.com/Fleet-Action-Commander-William-Forstchen/dp/0671722115
   
   
   
3. Not to forget the Dahak series by David Weber
   
   
   any other pre-Internet inspriational material I've missed? :)
   
   
   On a side-note, I wonder how Allie would fair if after the mission, post-war, she & Katherine get a explorer-class ship & mission and run into something like the Moties from Niven/Pournelle duology, if you're read that series?
   
   
   That said, as I've loved every series you've written in tthe past, I love this series,
   I love the characters & the story; I can't wait to see where all you take to by the end of this story!!!! :)
   
   
   Thank you again, and please keep track of yourself & your health as you work on the next section!
   
   
   Word to your mother!

In my eyes "The day the world came to town" is the most HFY book that exists, mainly because it's true. There's no humans being better than everyone and generally being loudmouthed warmongers, but you still read with a smile on your face and think "I'm glad I'm human"

The book describtion:
"For the better part of a week, nearly every man, woman, and child in Gander and the surrounding smaller towns stopped what they were doing so they could help. They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return. They affirmed the basic goodness of man at a time when it was easy to doubt such humanity still existed."

amazon link

On audible and possibly kindle there is the Bobiverse
Also the 'Gateway' series is an OLD hfy, dating back before the internet [the first three books are by far the best] but prep yourself for alternating perspectives as Pohl seems to enjoy them and uses them to great effect.
I know that my 'Back to human' is on kindle unlimited and paperback,

Transcripts has as well [book one] and book 0 will come out soon according to squiggles as will book 2

Absolutely.

The main book I would say has helped me instrumentally is this one. It was suggested to me when I had the privilege of speaking to a New York Times bestselling author. He recommended it highly, along with this book that I have not had a chance to get into yet.

The first one is a major chore to read. It is not bad or hard to comprehend in any way, just very conceptually thick. I have read books twice as thick that communicate half as much.

The second one is great too, but I realized I needed the first one more earlier on.

Anyway, I hope those help!

You might be interested in the book Not by the Sword. It's a worthy read.

The Amazon blurb:

>Not by the Sword tells the inspiring true story of how a Jewish cantor and his family changed the life of a virulent white supremacist leader. This riveting account begins in 1991, when Cantor Michael Weisser received his first threatening phone call from Larry Trapp, Grand Dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Nebraska. But Cantor Weisser and his wife, Julie, refused to be intimidated by Trapp's escalating threats. Instead, they made a stunning offer of friendship. After an emotional confrontation with the Weissers, Trapp shocked everyone—including himself—by resigning from the KKK and breaking his ties with other neo-Nazi leaders.

>Not by the Sword recounts Larry Trapp’s life as a racist, his startling transformation in response to the Weissers’ kindness, and his subsequent crusade to redeem his past. Kathryn Watterson movingly describes how one family feared, fought, and then forgave a man who had tried to destroy them.

>This gripping tale gives the reader an inside view of hate mongering and offers a powerful testament to the triumph of the human spirit and the transforming power of love and tolerance.

Lovely story, BTW. The militaristic ones are fun, but this one... This one is special. Thanks for that.

Great story. I would love to see a sequel series for the Terrans. (gotta go back through and make sure all chapters have an upvote)

Also, this series reminds me of a book series I started reading midway through your first chapter and the last one. If you are interested in reading about what you wrote about.

The series is called "We are Legion; We are Bob" it also involves a human becoming a von Neumann spaceship. No alie...no spacefaring aliens in that series yet, though.

Thank you for the links.
The wiki one actually helped quite a bit, which is honestly a rare thing for wiki articles to do ;)

Got some more questions, if you don't mind:

Is information transfer possible between something traveling near speed of light, and something else?
Say we have a "room", and inside it a person is traveling at the speed of light, in what ways, if any, could people outside the room interact with the person inside, and vice versa?
I guess what I'm asking is: Is it possible for the traveler to detect events outside the room and/or is it possible for people outside the room to detect changes/events inside the room?

If information can't be exchanged; in the same scenario of the near lightspeed room:
Every X minutes in the travelers reference he stops, and exchanges information with people outside the room, then goes back to near lightspeed for another X minutes.
Wouldn't this effectively be a time machine? Since every time he'd stop, a much longer timeframe would've passed by outside the room?

What I'm getting at is:
If everyone is in such a room, wouldn't that effectively eliminate things like, say, processing speed for a computer? Just let it take as long as it wants, travel faster to counteract the effect?
So if an operation takes a year in "normal" time, pop into the near lightspeed room for a second, and a year will have passed outside it, but only a second for you?

And if everyone is traveling at near lightspeed, but separately? Kind of a reverse lockstep society?


Sorry if I'm being stupid, I just find the idea fascinating.

If this won't get me in trouble, for those interested, I have an anthology out with my short writings for FREE on Amazon entitled Psychological Shadow Plays:

http://www.amazon.com/Psychological-Shadow-Plays-W-Baird-ebook/dp/B01D4ZCXZM/

If you're interested in non-Western sci-fi, I'd recommend the Three Body Problem and its sequels. I'm reading the first book now and it's quite good.

I can't find a copy of the actual text online but this is a good summation. The book is short and you can get it for just a few dollars used. Chapter 5 is the one about the "Our Father." It is a short book that you could easily read in a day or two.

I really enjoyed The Cross Time Engineer. It's about being dropped into the medieval era, but still works. (Later books get further "out there", but I still enjoyed them.)

Or head to amazon and buy the book!

If there is ever a day I won't take the opportunity to encourage people to support u/Squigglestorystudios it is not this day.

Sorry for the late reply! I have the link to the Amazon page at the bottom of the chapter, or, alternatively, you can click this handy link!

Edit: thank you so much for considering buying it, it means the world to me!

Buy the book HERE

If you've never read Armor by John Steakley, I'm gonna go ahead and recommend you read the fuck out of that.

https://www.amazon.com/Armor-John-Steakley/dp/0886773687

Awesome Work! Cant wait for your next one!

This isn't exactly what you asked for but "On Evolution's Shore" and it's sequel (and short stories) by Ian McDonald are amazing and criminally under-known. It has to do with people investigating a crisis in Africa caused by an alien "spore" crashing into jungle and terraforming it into "Chaga." I don't want to spoil things but, the Chaga isn't as hostile as is first believed (the gov version is that it's like the Chtorr). It tailors itself to maximize the habitat volume of it's occupants and allows them to make biotech. It eventually pits humans using Chaga derived / hybridized tech against "Mech" Tech. Sort of like the Yuuzhan Vong.

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutions-Shore-Ian-McDonald/dp/0553374354

If I'm recalling correctly the only mention of 'horse's weight is "around half a ton" (1000 lbs) which is really early in the series and if I'm remembering it may have been by /u/Ctwelve during a chapter of Good Training. It's also been mentioned frequently that he max's out a pallet scale, which after some quick googling is around 5000 lbs (2.5 tons, link below).

I agree, some of the scales are mind boggling and ridiculous, but I think this is why Hambone rarely use actual numerical figures, just so we can figure it out ourselves, and keeping those figures straight would (as we can tell by the above) would be a job in itself.

https://www.amazon.com/5000LB-Durable-Floor-Pallet-Scale/dp/B007WXMFZG

You might like Seeds of Terra.

The first part of the Transcripts series Amazon link. It's by /u/squigglestorystudios

I don't think there's a book of this yet, 5 parts seems kinda small for a book.

As far as I know there's the two major parts of Transcripts by /u/squigglestorystudios, part one which is done, and posted here, and that's what the book covers, Part 0 (prequel) is in progress now.

This arc is new to me, but I'll take my Transcripts hits anyway I can!

I think you are looking for Seeds of Terra by u/elevendog but he took it down to publish. The link is to the book on Amazon.

It's been published on Amazon: Seeds of Terra

Book 1 of Transcripts by u/squigglestorystudios / Michelle Kathleen Hodgson was recently published on Amazon here. The rest of the story is available here on Reddit.

This should be it... I think. My search-fu has been spotty lately.


Transcripts https://www.amazon.com/dp/1980714193/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_M0HXDbJW2EWFB