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  • Reminds me of an old C.S. Lewis sci-fi book (Perelandra) that had massive floating islands on top of the waves like this.

    • Some Peruvian indigenous people actually live on man made floating islands (on lakes, not at sea).

      • Do you know any more or have any good links ? I’d love to read about this?

        • I don't know much honestly, I know of them because of some friends living in Peru.

          You can look up Uru (or Uro) people.
          Basically it was their take on the castle and moat.
          The islands are made of some sort of cane, and have to be maintained regularly, it's very labor intensive.

          It's one of the many cultures there that are at a crossroads, since they have to choose a way between their traditional lifestyle and the comfort of modernity. Knowing that tourism can bring them an order of magnitude more money that what they can make locally, at the risk of becoming actors, maybe.

    • Perelandra!
      I read Out Of The Silent Planet and Perelandra as a boy, enjoyed them.

      But I couldn't make it through That Hideous Strength, I put it down baffled and bored one day, and never picked it up again. Now I'm thinking I was too young for it, particularly growing up so far away from the novel's setting in England.

      The first two novels take place in Mars and Venus, so there's a sense of adventure. But in That Hideous Strength, the mannerisms and situations and dialogue styles are akin to something like Brideshead Revisited in Oxford and/or Cambridge.

      While a British boy might get the whole thing intuitively, I grew up in Mexico, so had no mental compass of that world at that age. It was all as confusing to me then as God Emperor Of Dune was later.

      • I really loved the sense of adventure in both. A lot of people dislike That Hideous Strength relative to the others, so I don't think you're alone. I actually loved it, but I was a bit older when I read it. I felt like it was a rare example building an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. However, it's been many years since I read it. My own opinion of it may be different now.

15 comments