Paste a passage from your favourite speculative fiction, replacing all the proper nouns with “Lemmy”. Then I’ll try to guess where it came from without using google :)

  • TroyOPM
    1·
    1 year ago

    Okay, so I still don’t know what it is, but I have “To Be Taught, if Fortunate” by Becky Chambers in my to-read queue, and I suspect this might be it. It has that letters written back to earth vibe that I’m expecting once I start reading it.

    • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Nope. Let me find a different excerpt:

      Intelligence wastes itself on animals and their trammeled, repetitive lives. They mature, reproduce, and die faster than pines, each animal equivalent to its forebearer, never smarter, never different, always reprising their ancestors, never unique. Yet with more intelligence, less control. The mindless root fungus never fails, but moth messengers come and go with seasons, larger animals grow immune to addictions, and the first foreigners, who built the city, abandoned it and me without explanation or motive just as we had begun to communicate. Did they discover my nature and flee, or was their nature renegade?

      […]

      I would have died without these new foreigners, I will die without them, but I have seen that intelligence makes animals unstable.

      I must communicate with them and finally I have the strength. I am growing a root to store what I learn, but it now contains little more than pith. I have not tapped their intellect and used it like phosphates.

      • TroyOPM
        1·
        1 year ago

        Okay, I still don’t have an answer. But I know for certain that, had I read this book, I would remember it haha. It does remind me of Vandermeer somewhat, but all of his books that I’ve read were on Earth. It also evokes the Pequeninos from Orson Scott Cards “Speaker for the Dead”, a species that ends their life as a tree. But in the latter case, they begin their life as an animal, so the plant POV here doesn’t match, in particular the disdain it shows for animals.

        But it sounds amazing! It’s like a first contact story where the alien is intelligent and alien. Tchaikovsky would be proud.

          • TroyOPM
            1·
            1 year ago

            Let’s leave it for now, and resolve in the future. It sounds like a great book and should be in my queue haha, but the point of the thread was to create some self-starter content for the community. And there’s still a chance someone else will know ;)

        • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          It is a first contact story in a way, though it’s the humans who are the aliens arriving on the planet.

          Also, the speaker (“bamboo”) in the second quote may be a “plant”, but other than being RNA-based (like some simple life forms on Earth; the book/series assumes panspermia on a building blocks of life level), life on that planet isn’t in any way related to Earth life (well, except for the humans themselves once they arrive). The “bamboo” might mention “pines” in that excerpt, but both “bamboo” and “pines” are just what the humans would come to call those species opon their discovery, because they remind them of the respectively named plant species back on Earth.