Paul Fagan 🇮🇪🇵🇸

@paulfagan.bsky.social

109 Followers 99 Following

Love space, books and books about space. But our planet is the only one we know with life, which makes us precious. Love my family most.

Email screenshot from Kelly Deridder to her campaign followers titled: KW Palestine Festival - A Message from Kelly DeRidder. It reads: "Celebrating our individual cultures here in Canada is something to admire. I personally love spending time in our many ethnic communities and honouring their art, culture, clothing, music, dance and faith. But this event happening in our city centre is not that. It is spreading division and hate here in Canada and dragging conflicts from others countries into our neighbourhoods. That is not acceptable in our communities. I have written a personal letter to the Mayor and to the Chief of the Waterloo Regional Police to make clear that this kind of event is not a celebration of culture, it is an attempt to inflame foreign political conflict on Canadian soil.
Termination Shock, a novel by Neal Stephenson. Published in 2021 as a near-future science fiction book, it focuses around the unusual and difficult to predict problems that climate change brings - such as Texas being over-run by giant feral hogs - and a small group of people with a wealth of resources trying to stop climate change by taking extreme means. It's deeply entertaining, and while it seems outrageous, so is our reality, so it hits the mark perhaps more than it should.
Choosing between: One day, everyone will have always been against this, by Omar Al Akkad Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson Claw of the conciliator by Gene Wolfe The last man by Brian Vaughan Exhalation by Ted Chiang The Great When by Alan Moore
Kitchener Centre riding results: Incumbent Green MP Mike Morrice loses his seat to the Conservatives by 358 votes. Liberals came in third with 29.3% of the vote.
Riding results for Kitchener-Conestoga. Incumbent Tim Louis is declared the winner by 522 votes.
Pope Francis meeting J D Vance and thinking "if I have to listen to this man for 1 more minute I will die."
Beer Store in London, Ontario where the highlighted review says "I go in daily to get beer for my husband and the..."
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Mercy of the Gods by James SA Corey, author(s) of The Expanse
Photo of ISS passing the Moon's Tycho crater, by Cosmic Background.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. A small cheat since I just finished this book, but I can't shake it. So brilliant, so inspiring. Exactly the book I needed to start 2025. 50 years old, but it's just as relevant now.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Another short story collection packed with concepts that I can't shake. Also, just stunning writing. This book is a gem.
Text message from Ontario PCs that says "Doug Ford here. Help me protect Ontario's jobs and our economy from Trump's tariffs."
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. The best time travel story I've read and one of the funniest books I've ever read. Of all the books I've read that I thought should be made into TV, this is number 1. The ultimate escapist book, I recommend it all the time because it feels like nobody's heard of it and that's a damn shame.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Crazy intense vibes, some of the best character writing I've ever read, and while exaggerated slightly in some of the tech, I think it's way closer to reality than anyone would like to admit.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. This book was prophetic indeed! Written in a hypnotic style, it tells the tale of a family trying to live their life under a new authoritarian police-state where gradually those who don't tow the ideological line get pushed out or disappear. Sound familiar?
An Immense World by Ed Yong. I read this in bits, because all at once was information overload, but it constantly filled me with a sense of wonder. It made me appreciate the magnitude of how much diversity there is in the animal kingdom and how the world can be something completely different depending on how it's viewed. I feel like I don't need to take 'shrooms because I read this book and now I get it.
Communications Breakdown, edited by Jonathan Strahan. An outstanding short story anthology featuring some of my favourite writers and packed with thought provoking and super relevant stories. Each of these stories had a powerful statement on our current world of haphazard super-connection, and the prescience of some of them has been frightening.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Fantasy, horror, locked room mystery, adventure, queer romance, and just 10 out of 10 on the cool scale.
Saga by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples. I love this series. It's amazing in many different ways (but lots of weird alien nudity, just to warn). It contains possibly my all time favourite quote: "Anyone who thinks one book has all the answers hasn't read enough books."
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I can still vividly remember listening to this and feeling my understanding of his reality hit me like a brick wall. I was just becoming a parent and his note to his kid crushed me emotionally. I am a changed person because of this book.
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. Not the best multiverse story, but a very clever and original one, and my first foray into what multiverse could look like. I've read many better books since this one, but this instilled a sense of wonder in me that drove my reading habits for the next decade.
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. Totally widened my understanding of the civil war that dominated Ireland for decades, and told in such a gripping style. I recommend it to anyone interested in Ireland. The show was also amazing, but skips over the Thatcher era, which was too bad, so if you like the show, there's even more to like in the book!
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Read this in the midst of lockdown and gave me a fresh perspective on isolation. Clarke is a beautiful writer, and this was such a mental health boost.
Swamp Thing by Alan Moore (Part 6). The series matters more than any original issue or book, but this is the only piece of literature that I have felt the need to have tattooed to myself. I remember liking V for Vendetta most of Moore's work, but it's been over 10 years since I read it, so I picked a safe choice.
Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear. I LOVE Space Opera, and this one might be my favourite. Bear is a fantastic storyteller, and I loved the way this developed. Her sequel is just as good.
The Knowing by Tanya Talaga. The Canadian revisionist history book for our generation. Will never stop recommending it
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Neal Stephenson is one of my favourite authors. I've read 6 of his books so far, and they are all fantastic in their own right but this is definitely my favourite. I rarely recommend it, because it's 900 pages and involves an unusual amount of math and hard philosophy, but the pay off is one of the most imaginative and immersive reads to have been published, in my humble opinion.
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? By N. K. Jemisin. While she's best known for her Broken Earth fantasy trilogy, my favourite writing by her is probably her Science Fiction. This collection has an incredible range and I loved every story in it. I think some of her best writing is in this book.
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. A slow-creep vibes book that suggests that things can get better even if they get worse first, and just a friendly reminder that a lot can happen in 300 years. Humans will always be humans and it'll never be perfect, but our descendants might look back at this time as the Dark Times, like the technological Dark Ages before the Renaissance. It's very convincing and though I didn't love it at first it stuck with me in a way few books do.
Babel by R. F. Kuang. Of the last 100 books I've read, this one has been far and away the most impactful and memorable.
A nurse was salded with hot coffee by a white patient, who poured it on her and called her the n-word. She has 2nd degree burns on her face and chest. After 2 days of recovery, her boss is asking that she return to work.
NASA email mandating that staff snitch on anyone they believe to be enforcing DEIA policies
Closing ceremony when we crowned the Marble Fantasy League winner. I blocked out the faces since I didn't ask their permission to share.
Each column represents a player's fantasy team. When a team they selected gets a medal, the player gets points.
Leafy tree
KPL book display "Voices of Palestine"
Solar eclipse Apr 2024
Blood moon