{"id":22672,"date":"2026-08-16T20:47:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T19:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/?p=22672"},"modified":"2026-08-29T11:10:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T10:10:24","slug":"food-of-the-day-porky-vegetables-with-rice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/?p=22672","title":{"rendered":"Food of the Day: Porky Vegetables with Rice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Another old favourite, followed by a sublime blackberry crumble and the quiz at which we scored an acceptable 12.
\nA1 is reading Slow Gods<\/em> by Claire North (thanks A2!), which was a Slow Read — partly due to other commitments, but mainly because it’s a dense and intriguing hard sf novel, worth savouring. CN isn’t usually noted for hard sf, and they* do slip up a bit here: a supernova neutrino burst isn’t planet-destroying, and for neutrinos to hurt a human you’d have to be at about the same distance from the supernova as Mars is from the Sun<\/a>. And that would be the least of your worries…
\nBut the meat of the book is about a star pilot, strangely changed (“I am a very poor copy of myself”) by the experience of FTL travel — through “arcspace”, or the “dark”, in an echo of Adrian Tchaikovsky — to be near-immortal. He is born in debt-ridden servitude in a hyper-capitalist society, and his only escape is the nearly always fatal piloting job. It’s the story of his coming to terms with the changes he undergoes, and what it means to be human … or at least a conscious entity.
\nIt’s an impressive book, if flawed, which I suspect will appear on various award shortlists.
\nA2 is reading Silent Bones<\/em>* by Val McDermid.<\/p>\n

* CN prefers non-gendered pronouns, and this novel contains more variations on pronouns than you can shake a stick at.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another old favourite, followed by a sublime blackberry crumble and the quiz at which we scored an acceptable 12. A1 is reading Slow Gods by Claire North (thanks A2!), which was a Slow Read — partly due to other commitments, but mainly because it’s a dense and intriguing hard sf novel, worth savouring. CN isn’t … Continue reading “Food of the Day: Porky Vegetables with Rice”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22672"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22692,"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22672\/revisions\/22692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vermilionsands.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}