The Sword of Good by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here's a book that makes you laugh and think at the same time.  The hero of the story is named Hirou.  If you don't get it, try saying it out loud.  He's been transported from modern-day Earth to a fantasy realm that he turns out to be the prince of.  Hirou's weapon of choice is the bluntly named Sword of Good that destroys its owner if the owner doesn't have good intentions.  There's a prophecy involved that he will face the Lord of Dark and be given a choice between Good and Bad.  Of course, Hirou instantly tells his friends that he'll choose good: the options being named "good" and "bad" are kind of a giveaway for him, as well as the bad guy being called the "Lord of Dark" and numerous other blatant wordings.  It turns out at the end that it's a tad more complicated than that, but I'll let you read it and see what happens.  It's an online book, and you can read it here: http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good

Up almost until the very end, it delivers wonderful humor.  The last part transitions into high drama that will keep you turning the -- scrolling your mouse until the last sentence is done.  The Sword of Good deconstructs the typical aspects of a fantasy story.  Hirou is able to question the normal fantasy conventions because he comes from our world.  If you were told you'd be given a choice between good and bad and then asked which one you'd pick in the future, you'd say good without hesitation too.  The other characters are all surprised when he does this, too, for added laughs.

The only real flaw I noticed was that it mentions the TV tropes wiki.  I love TV tropes.  I spend hours at a time on it when I'm supposed to be doing schoolwork.  I know almost all of the regular terminology, and I love reading about TV tropes... on TV tropes.  When somebody references a term from TV tropes outside of the website, it never comes off well.  Mentioning the website itself sounds even worse, staining the next few paragraphs with a bad feeling of pretentiousness. 

Except for the single sentence about TV tropes, however, the book was enjoyable, thought-provoking, and amusing throughout.  If you're stuck somewhere with only your laptop and need a good book, The Sword of Good would be an excellent choice.

Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I'm back and better that ever!  If you like it here, you might also want to mosey on over to my other blog, which is the same thing only for music videos.  www.blogger.com/musicvideoperdiem

Today I review a book published on the internet.  You yourself can read it here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

It's not a spoiler at all to say that the first aliens that the humans meet eat their own young.  The title of part one is "The Baby-Eating Aliens" and it mentions those aliens in the description.  These aliens spawn thousands of babies and then eat them when they would be preteens as far as development goes.  It's not like the babies they eat are without intelligence, either.  They're about the same as human children.  Is this some strange fanatic sect on this planet?  No.  It's just how the aliens are culturally.  Their word for "good" translates as "baby-eating".  This is a stark contrast to aliens who have moral systems identical to ours and only have a few cultural quirks.  The author even wrote a separate article about how aliens in most science fiction stories are just human counterparts, no matter how funny-looking they are: http://lesswrong.com/lw/so/humans_in_funny_suits/

The book, of course, deals with rationality, something that the entire rest of the website is about.  The interesting part, though, is how different the two sets of aliens are from us.  It's almost hard to imagine living as one of the baby eating aliens or the super happy people, who are the second set of aliens encountered.  I won't spoil it, but I liked the first ending a lot better than the "true" ending, even though the latter was supposed to be the happy ending.  I really didn't see what was wrong with the... alterations.

All in all, it was a good book.  Impeccably written, Three Worlds Collide told a fun story with aliens who will most likely be on my mind for weeks to come as I try to imagine being among them.