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Almost totally off topic, hanging onto relevance by the narrowest of threads.

I've just found my new favourite author.

Cixin Liu (or is that Liu Cixin, I don't know) is an SF write from China, I have just read a free offering of his from Amazon which you can download for free as an E-book. It's a novella describing humanity's travails in escaping the death of the sun with the earth as our spaceship.

To say this this book is epic, majestic and terrifying in it's magnificient concept is a remarkable understatement. But to fail to acknowledge the hope gleaned from finding an author who is willing to conceive of humanity facing up to huge and terrible challenges with stoicism and resourcefulness would be a mistake.

The Wandering Earth

It's simply unlike anything I have ever read.

But what is more remarkable is that it hits the very note that I have been attempting to hit with my last warp



Can you see what I'm trying to do? It's supposed to be like a representation of the galaxy as viewed in transit at high speed, with stars stretched out and long wispy streamers of pink gas flitting by. The other thing you'll notice about this warp is the large number of broken ends I've chosen not to fix. As we know, all things in the universe are subject to entropy, which is the tendency of ordered systems to break down into chaos. The yarn itself accelerates this process as the added fibres clung to each other causing broken ends and many weird lifts and poor shedding. As a careless god weaving my own little universe I have gleefully chosen to let the cloth do as it wishes to do, pausing only to remove broken ends from the back of the shafts. The funny thing is you really can't tell until you look closely. This mirrors the apparent simplicity if large systems when viewed from far away, but when examined up close reveal hidden depths of complexity and numerous exceptions to dearly held natural laws. Somewhere on this warp I have darned in a single grey thread, this represents humanity sailing blindly onwards through the incomprehensible vastness of space, unaware of the dangers that may await us, lurking in the darkness to cut short the thread of our existence

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