#cuckoo's egg

[whumpofalltime]

Whump Book of All Time: Preliminary Match Up #8

Cuckoo's Egg by C.J. Cherryh vs The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Cuckoo's Egg

The Curse of Chalion

Voting ended onNov 16, 2025

Propaganda under the cut!

New propaganda will be added and reblogged, and will follow the winning entry into the next round. Positive propaganda only, please.

Preliminary rounds are open for one week.

Cuckoo's Egg:

Anon says, "An alien from another planet raises a human among his kind and the way he treats the human is reallllly not the way humans are supposed to be treated. But this alien, of course, being alien, does not know about the human psyche or the limits of the human body."

The Curse of Chalion:

"Cazaril deserves the world but doesn't realize it ❤️ Already disabled after fighting in a war, and "broken in body and spirit" (to quote the official synopsis), Cazaril is given a curse from performing a selfless act and becomes sicker and sicker throughout the book. He hides his sickness from others and so the proper comfort takes a while to happen, but when it does, oh is it beautiful!"

[wifeofwolfwoman]

C. J. Cherryh got me feeling lost and sad (i read Cuckoo's Egg)

[judgeitbyitscover]

Cuckoo's Egg by C. J. Cherryh

Cover art by Michael Whelan

DAW Books, October 1985

They named him Thorn. They told him he was their people, although he was so different. He was ugly in their eyes, strange, sleek-skinned instead of furred, clawless, different. Yet he was of their power class: judge-warriors, the elite, the fighters, the defenders.

Thorn knew that his difference was somehow very important -- but not important enough to prevent murderous conspiracies against him, against his protector, against his cast, and perhaps against the peace of the world. But when the crunch came, when Thorn finally learned what his true role in life was to be, that on him might hang the future of two worlds, then he had to stand alone to justify his very existence.

[wtfbadfantasycovers]

Wow.

[ecstaticsec]

The Cuckoo's Egg

I just finished reading The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, a 1989 book written by astronomer-turned-computer-investigator, Clifford Stoll, and probably the first in the 'Hacker Thriller' genre. Over 25 years after the fact, and the lessons are more relevant than ever.

Here's one of the hacker's POV (spoiler alert) in a 1989 Phrack 25

Clifford's academic paper Stalking The Wiley Hacker [pdf]

Clifford's 2006 TED talk The Call to Learn

PBS produced a 1990 documentary The KGB, the Computer, and Me

Richard Bejtlich even did a talk called Cooking The Cuckoo's Egg

Buy a hardback copy for 5$ on Amazon.

[kittysneezes]

Engraved Portraits of Gauss for sale by Acme Klein Bottle! In 2002, our printer was pushed out of the Gauss Portrait Business by a giant European multi-national conglomerate. Recently, we uncovered a special stash, which are now for sale. HURRY - NO MORE ARE BEING MADE! OUR SUPPLY IS FINITE, NONZERO, AND COUNTABLE! As a service to those who appreciate the joy of Gaussian Quadrature, Acme has imported a small number of quality portraits of this great mathematician. Now on sale, along with a FREE BONUS! Seven year old Carl Frederich Gauss amazed his teachers instantly adding all the integers from 1 to 100. Fourteen years later, he made a regular 17-gon by ruler and compass -- the first advance in the field since the ancient Greeks. Then in 1801, he solved the orbit of the newly-discovered asteroid Ceres, by inventing the method of least-squares. In 1818, Gauss surveyed German locations into the Danish geodetic grid. He observed during the day, then calculated positions at night -- astonishing surveyors with his skills. As director of Gottingen Observatory, he developed the fields of hypergeometric functions, potential theory, differential equations, conic sections, terrestrial magnetism, and celestial mechanics. And, of course, he developed the Gaussian Bell Curve, to account for the statistical variation in individual observations of stellar locations. There's hardly a branch of math untouched by Gauss. In 2001, Acme Klein Bottle's entire staff and management visited Berlin, researching the Kleinsche Flasche. On returning, he discovered several copies of this picture in his pocket. Thanks to this foresight, you can own a picture of this illustrious polymath.

Miniature Portrait of Gauss for Sale

[kpopdabbler]

#booksIsuggest

[painiac]