this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Is there an author that writes like this? I would like to read an entire book of this.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

This is Tiffany, walking back home. Start with the boots. They are big and heavy boots, much repaired by her father and they'd belonged to various sisters before her; she wore several pairs of socks to keep them on. They are big. Tiffany sometimes feels she is nothing more than a way of moving boots around.

Then there is the dress. it has been owned by many sisters before her and has been taken up, taken out, taken down and taken in by her mother so many times that it really ought to have been taken away.

A few pages later

She ran out of her hiding place with the frying pan swinging like a bat. The screaming monster, leaping out of the water, met the frying pan coming the other way with a clang.

It was a good clang, with the oiyoiyoiyoioioioioinnnnnnggggg that is the mark of a clang well done.

Terry Pratchett — The Wee Free Men

And Corporal Nobbs... well, anyone like Nobby had unlimited reasons for not wishing to be seen by other people. You didn't have to think hard about that. The only reason you couldn't say that Nobby was close to the animal kingdom was that the animal kingdom would get up and walk away.

It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are — who knows?

Best not to speculate.

Thunder rolled...

It rolled a six.

Terry Pratchett — Guards Guards

I think Douglas Adams might fit even better though.

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Douglas Adams — The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I love Douglas Adams and HHGttG probably did more to inform my politics than any other single source, and it feels completely relevant today. If anything, Adams wasn't cynical enough when writing Zaphod.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Christopher Moore as well! Let me go find some snippets.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. Trust me, I was there. I know. The first time I saw the man who would save the world he was sitting near the central well in Nazareth with a lizard hanging out of his mouth. Just the tail end and the hind legs were visible on the outside; the head and forelegs were halfway down the hatch. He was six, like me, and his beard had not come in fully, so he didn’t look much like the pictures you’ve seen of him.

Noir

She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes — a size eight dame in a size six dress and every mug in the joint was rooting for the two sizes to make a break for it as they watched her wiggle in the door and take a seat at the end of the bar. I raised an eyebrow at the South African merchant marine who’d been spinning out tales of his weird cargo at the other end of the bar while I polished a shot glass.

Fluke: or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

The whale was into a section of the song they called the “green” themes, a long series of whoops that sounded like an ambulance driving through pudding. A less trained listener might have thought that the whale was rejoicing, celebrating, shouting howdy to the world to let everyone and everything know that he was alive and feeling good, but Nate was a trained listener, perhaps the most trained listener in the world, and to his expert ears the whale was saying — Well, he had no idea what in the hell the whale was saying, did he?

Bloodsucking Fiends

Sundown painted purple across the great Pyramid while the Emperor enjoyed a steaming whiz against a dumpster in the alley below. A low fog worked its way up from the bay, snaked around columns and over concrete lions to wash against the towers where the Wests’ money was moved. The financial district: an hour ago it ran with rivers of men in gray wool and women in heels; now the streets, built on sunken ships and gold-rush garbage, were deserted quiet except for a foghorn that lowed across the bay like a lonesome cow.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

Depending on what specifically appeals to you, you'd probably like Literary nonsense aithors or Absurdist fiction authors.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The first one instantly made me think of Douglas Adams

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I can see the similarity but IMO this isn't that close to Douglas Adams.

Edit: did DA make a lot of puns and wordplay? Specifically taking well-known phrases but using their literal interpretation?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

His dark green rubbery skin was thick enough for him to play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well, and waterproof enough for him to survive indefinitely at sea depths of up to a thousand feet with no ill effects.

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape

something like these, perhaps? There are probably better examples, I just skimmed through the first couple chapters of Hitchiker's Guide to the galaxy

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Well, in the first bit of the Hitchhiker's guide, there's:

“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.”

Which does fit, even if it's not necessarily a "well-known phrase"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago

I'll take it, and I stand corrected.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Terry Pratchett Discworld books? From memory the ones about witches at least had a good bit of it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Check out Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series.

For a long while you're not actually sure what species the characters are, what their defining features are, if they even have gender, and/or how many limbs they have.

You just know what they're like from their cutting remarks to one another.

It's a series that focuses solely on plot and has a very loose definition of identity (and it's awesome)