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Wellness Wednesday for January 8, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I want to read more science fiction, I haven't been able to get into the genre in a while.

If you liked Stranger, it arguably isn't Heinlein's best work. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is more widely highly regarded, and Time Enough For Love is more polarizing but more highly regarded by many.

Basically, I'm in the mood for lighter fare.

If you're not averse to books for tweens and teens as being way too light, Heinlein's "juveniles" (my favorite was Citizen of the Galaxy) and juvenile-accessible novels (especially Starship Troopers, Double Star) were pretty good for what they are.

I was thinking of picking up Starship Troopers next. Stranger is the most leftist of fantasies, Troopers is often pointed out as borderline-fascist, so I want to see the flip.

Also they were written back-to-back, Troopers in 1959, Stranger in 1961. (Both won Hugos.) I think that's important to keep in mind when comparing, like both were the product of essentially the same Heinlein, not different phases or eras.

The movie may be fascist, but the book is significantly different, more nuanced, and better.