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White to move and mate in two #424 - is your imagination big enough to hold this house? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-29  

Well, of course it is. Needless to say, that was a rhetorical question...

My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds. No doors: the arched entrances are farcaster portals, a few opaqued with privacy curtains, most open to observation and entry. Each room has windows everywhere and at least two walls with portals. From the grand dining hall on Renaissance Vector, I can see the bronze skies and the verdigris towers of Keep Enable in the valley below my volcanic peak, and by turning my head I can look through the farcaster portal and across the expanse of white carpet in the formal living area to see the Edgar Allan Sea crash against the spires of Point Prospero on Nevermore. My library looks out on the glaciers and green skies of Nordholm while a walk of ten paces allows me to descend a short stairway to my tower study, a comfortable, open room encircled by polarized glass which offers a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the highest peaks of the Kushpat Karakoram, a mountain range two thousand kilometers from the nearest settlement.

“Dan Simmons’ 1989 novel Hyperion won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel of that year, and with good reason. In the distant future and on the brink of the apocalypse for the human race, a misfit band of seven pilgrims (and a baby) makes its way to the planet Hyperion to visit the mysterious creature the Shrike–known as the Lord of Pain to the interstellar church dedicated to it. The trip itself is uneventful and the route largely deserted since most people on Hyperion are trying to escape the collision course between the Shrike, the Hegemony of Man, and the Ousters set for the planet. This is to be the final pilgrimage.”

Excerpt from a review of Hyperion by one Josh Nudell.

Metz O’Magic here. The above is from a capsule review of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time. I’ve read most of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels from the 1950’s onwards, and Hyperion is in my top ten.

P.S. I hope I posted this at the right/traditional time. Our clocks here in Ireland just went back an hour last night, and I believe the clocks in North America did as well.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/10/29/2202392/-White-to-move-and-mate-in-two-424-is-your-imagination-big-enough-to-hold-this-house

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