Thank you for your essential work on maintaining literature.cafe's hygiene.
Please note the metadata of the DePauw University hyperlinks never references SFS, in case of confusion. Furthermore, you might be interested in the SFE article on SFS, although it's outdated (last modified 2022).
Excellent.
This week I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World (1966). I had previously read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973), and the The Dispossessed (1974) is in progress.
Besides the advent of the world wide web, I've always supposed the proliferation of audiobooks and podcasts has had a fundamental link with the proliferation of traffic jams.
I've never been much of an audiobook listener. However, the few ones I've listened to I've enjoyed very much. Excellent narration, excellent voice acting. I used to play them while cooking, and then while eating what I had just cooked. Then if I was drinking wine with the food, the experience continued, extending into the horizons of my imagination.
I think it makes perfect sense. Federation is great, certainly, but at the same time it's desirable to keep certain communities local, as otherwise they might not be able to focus on what they're meant to be about.
While the fluidity of interconnection is one of the principal aspects of the fediverse, if no particular group were able to specialize, then having different instances, or even using different applications, could become pointless.
I'm an avid reader of L. E. Modesitt Jr's oeuvre. I'm usually on at least one of his novels in parallel with whatever else I'm reading at that moment. For a few years now, I've been immersed in his “Saga of Recluce” series, an informal name given by the readers, if I remember correctly. I'm currently at the fifth novel, in publication order, which is also the last one in the internal chronological order. After that, I'll continue with the sixth published novel, one of the oldest stories in the internal chronology, and one that narrates essential events. Following that one, I plan on interrupting the publication order to then read another few novels that I'm more interested in, due to the fundamental importance of those stories in the global arc, and therefore in the worldbuilding. Some of them narrate the oldest events in that world, thus far.
To anyone who may be interested in the series, my recommendation is to not search for worldbuilding and plot details online. I think it's best to get into it without knowing, or knowing as little as possible. Concomitantly, I agree with the author on his recommendation to read everything in publication order.
More recently, I started one of his science fiction novels, which is what has most of my attention at the moment, in fiction reading. It's Gravity Dreams (1999).