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The Telltale game (I haven’t played it yet) seems to be based on Drummer from the TV show. TV Drummer is radically different from Book Drummer. Book Drummer, certainly in the first six books, is a very minor presence, as the security chief on Tycho Station. TV Drummer is a composite of several book characters.

IIRC, there’s a bit of minor head cannon involving Book Drummer and “The Butcher of Anderson Station”. That might be referenced in the Telltale game, since it’s a prequel for TV Drummer.

Besides the earthquake, there was also a literal rain of fire across the planet, like a blast furnace, that likely killed everything that wasn’t underground or underwater.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/dinopocalypse-redux

Instead of drilling a hole, another way to do it is to slam an asteroid on the other side of the planet.

https://earthsky.org/earth/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-caused-indias-deccan-traps/

Samuel Delany, if you’re interested in look at New Wave stuff.

Africa-focused sci-fi but I don’t remember what that genre is called…

Africafuturism?

Getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has been productive. I read the Expanse (and the novella collection) as well as Project Hail Mary, and the first book of the Three Body Problem.

Making the pee more expensive, yes.

As a former sysadmin who hopped around to different machines to do stuff, I would hate it when I had to type on some developers’ computers, because they had set it up as Dvorak (vi on Dvorak is a special hell). Yes, it’s a more efficient keyboard as long as that’s the only machine you’re on. If you have to use different machines where most of the users are on QWERTY, you just use QWERTY.

Should that not be properly, “Oi, cunt!” ?

“OK, how can we make a web interface more difficult to use?”

We can call everyone “Colonel”, a la Col. Sanders.

I think The Expanse, while an amazing series that should be read anyway, doesn’t fit the bill of “humans are more advanced than the aliens”, since the Protomolecule and everything created by the Romans are essentially in the “tech as high level magic” category. Humans can’t even understand the technology, often saying things like, the Protomolecule just changed the laws of physics.

Well, it could be that the tech tree for intersteller travel is a road not taken by humans

There’s also “Children of the Sky”, which focuses on the humans on the Tines world.

The Honor Harrington series actually has some interesting tech disparities, besides being pretty good/exciting military science fiction.

In the first book, there are Bronze-Age-ish aboriginals.

In the second book, you see several human polities. Harrington interacts with less technologically/culturally developed groups of humans, and there are frictions and opportunities coming from the more advanced polity.

Harrington’s polity generally remains the most technologically advanced group. There’s later interaction with human polities who had thought they were the top dog, in terms of military power.

Just to note, it’s a big series that gets somewhat too sprawling in the later books. The earlier books are Age of Sail (IN SPACE!!!) adventures, which transforms into a wide-ranging interstellar war driven by technology change. Weber’s analogy is sailing ships -> steam ironclads -> Dreadnaught battleships -> WW2 radar directed gunnery / aircraft carriers. Not everyone is at the same tech level.

I need to point out that “aliens communicating in memes” was done by ST:TNG, in the Darmok episode.

Alien: “Shaka, when the walls fell” (essentially Disappointed Guy meme)

Picard: …

Why does Baron, being the tallest Trump, not simply eat the other Trumps?

But how do you keep the ice cream cake from melting over that time?

The Expanse is an interesting case of book-to-TV adaptation. The authors for the books were fairly involved with the TV series, and, in some ways, it’s their retelling of the main story with some changes that streamlined things for the visual medium. The main things have to do with the consolidation of several characters (e.g., most prominently TV Drummer is an amalgam of three or four different people from the books), and the early introduction of some other ones (e.g., Avasarala and Draper) (though, on the flip side, because of the way actors contracts work, these characters were given make-work arcs in some seasons because they don’t appear during the corresponding books). These changes generally made sense and were pretty well done.

Anyway, the books are excellent. The TV series is excellent.

Note that the last three books were not adapted for TV, though there was some set up that will eventually lead into those books. One logistical trick is that the last three take places some 30 years after the first six, so there’s a matter of the actors’ ages. But the TV series ended very well. You want more, but the main plot lines dominating the first six books were tied up.

Where would you put, say, the Culture, where biological beings are perfectly happy with machines running the place, while the Minds engage in some light imperialism on the side, when, uh, special circumstances called for it, in the Minds’ view. We can call it the “Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints” level.