Name: Another fine myth
ISBN: 9780441023622

What Hacker News says

FlemlordSep 2009

Growing up, I was a big fan of Robert Aspirin who wrote the Another Fine Myth series. I found out he died recently so I picked up his latest, Dragons Wild. It's a young adult novel but it was a fun, nostalgic read.

Prior to that it was House of Suns by Alistair Reynolds. Far-future sci-fi about a group of traders who travel at near-relativistic speeds from planet to planet over billions of years, watching human civilizations rise and fall.

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thaumasiotesDec 2020

Ah, that sounds like a different exploit.

Above, you can fiddle the result of a coin toss by sleight of hand.

Here, you're not dexterous enough for that, but you can fiddle the result anyway by alternating between two processes. This is a more powerful approach!

There was an example of this that stuck with me in the (fantasy) book Another Fine Myth, in which the narrator must perform magic for a king, but lacks the ability to do magic. He has a single gimmick device and needs to pass it off as more than it is.

So he asks the king to choose one of two horses, and, when the king picks the real horse, says "by your word shall that creature be spared". Then the narration remarks that if the king had picked the other (fake) horse, the trick would have been performed on "the creature he [the king] had doomed with a word".

The lesson is, if you're offered a choice, you need to know what it is you're choosing before you make the choice. Participating in a process without knowing what the process consists of is another way to say "being scammed".

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skorguDec 2015

I was on a sf kick this year apparently.

Full list (why can't amazon show me the read dates of my kindle books?!):

- Ancillary Sword

- The Magician's Land

- The Three Body Problem (incomplete)

- Libriomancer, Codex Born, Unbound

- Thank You, Jeeves

- Omon Ra (incomplete)

- Stations of the Tide

- 1Q84 (staggeringly incomplete)