 Okay this is my next book tag video which I said I was going to do last week. This time it is the Reading Diversely book tag or the Books from Every Continent book tag. I saw it on Books and Quills and I'll link to her video below. The idea is to read and review books by authors from every continent and starting off I was certain that I already had that covered but it turned out I didn't. So I took several months to acquire books so I could do this and I'm really glad I did because I found some great books. There are seven continents on the earth and by continents I mean dry land masses. The only continent that has no native people is Antarctica of course so we don't count that one. Europe and Asia are a single continent. Eurasia but most maps divide Europe from Asia into two separate continents. India on the other hand is a separate continent but most maps include India together with Asia but I'm going to count Europe and India as separate continents so I will have seven. I'm going to start with Australia. There's Eclipse by K.A. Bedford. This book tag alone prompted me to find this book and I'm glad I did. It's an excellent book. It's extremely unpleasant though. Some of you may remember a few videos ago I made the point that calling a book unpleasant is not the same thing as saying it's a bad book. This is the book I was talking about. It's an excellent book. It's excellent science fiction. It's good hard far future science fiction with a really interesting take on alien contact but at the same time it's extremely unpleasant. It's one of the most unpleasant things I've ever read but excellent just the same. I had to read it. There's one or two chapters at a time and then set it aside to cool off and come back to it a few days later. I'll give this book its own review and explain in detail so look for that in the not too distant future. Next is Europe. I've mentioned Stanislaus Lim a number of times and I've been waiting to review this book and I'll give it its own review. This is the Siberiad. Stanislaus Lim uh being from Poland by the way this is a collection of short stories about two scientist inventor robots either in the distant future or distant mythological past. They're like ESOP's fables kind of stories. By far my favorite story in the whole book is the first one which is only six pages. You have the two robot scientists named Troll and Clopatius and in the first story which is called How the World Was Saved. Troll has invented a robot which can do anything that starts with the letter N and Clopatius tells it to do nothing. I'll do a review of this book on its own and tell you more about what happened. It was a big mistake by the way. Next is Asia and I'm choosing Russian authors Strogatsky Brothers. They wrote this book called Roadside Picnic. I had read about this book before but I didn't know anything about it and then early on a couple of years ago I had a couple of viewers advise me to look up this book and get it so I used this as an excuse to get the book and I'm glad I did. It's an excellent book. It's about a city in Russia or Eastern Europe that had been destroyed by some sort of alien contact. There is an underclass of mercenaries who have become proficient at getting in and out of the destroyed zone with remains of alien objects. It was thoroughly enjoyable. It reminded me a lot of damn Nation Alley which I reviewed already and again this book deserves its own review and I'll do that in the not too distant future. Next is India. This is a collection of stories by Vandana Singh called The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and of course there is a story by that name in this book. I had to order this from India. There was no US source. I was absolutely floored to find that there was a story in here that I had read before. I thought she was going to be entirely unfamiliar to me. That one story by the way was a story that I remembered specifically because I did not like it and after reading it again here I still don't like it but everything else in the book is is really good. I recommend that you look up Vandana Singh and read some of her stories. Now for South America. Of course I had to choose Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina. I've talked about him before and what an amazing author he is. When I went looking for more books by him I found references to this, the book of fantasy, which he and two author friends of his, Silvina Ocampo and her husband, A. B. Oy Casares. They had gotten together to write new stories for a book specifically collecting fantasy stories and I thought it would be a book that just had their three stories in it. But no, it turned out that this is a huge collection, a gigantic collection. Borges story in here by the way is fantastic as usual. The name of his story is a collection of words that are almost unpronounceable here. I'll show it to you. And as is typical for Borges it involves psychotic levels of detail but in a way that is entertaining because in a Borges story that's the point of the story. The rest is made up of super short stories and selections from novels and even just a snips of sentences and paragraphs from other authors. J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Lewis Carroll, G. K. Chesterton, Jean Cocteau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Petronius, Edgar Allen Poe, Olaf Stapledon, Leo Tolstoy, Voltaire, Evelyn Wah, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yates, Mary Shelley, and it's amazing. Interesting collection. Now for North America. I could have of course picked any number of hundreds of authors that I've read and authors who are in my collection already but since we're talking about authors from that continent I wanted to get specific about Native Americans so I went searching for Native Americans who are writing science fiction and it turns out there's a few. There's actually enough of them that I had choices to make. I ended up going with this. This is something that was recommended to me again by someone on Twitter I think. Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart by Gerald Visner. It apparently takes place in a post-apocalyptic North America. I haven't gotten around to reading this one yet but I will and I'll let you know what happens. I'm saving Africa for last because this is where I found the most interesting variety of collections. First of all there's Forest of a Thousand Demons by D. O. Fagunwa. This was first published in Nigeria in 1939. This is apparently the first novel ever written in the Yoruba language which is of course native to Nigeria. It is a collection of mythological tales. I've read about half of it and it's not that good. The stories don't really have morals to them. They're not like Eesop's fables kind of stories. I would say it's more like a really violent and misogynistic Alice in Wonderland kind of thing. Again, not very good but historically important and I'm glad I found it. Next is Thomas Mafolo's Shaka. I have not gotten around to reading this one yet. It is evidently a fictionalized and mythologized account of the life of the great Zulu leader. The last one is Khala by Sembenio Usmani. He was a Senegalese author and filmmaker. Apparently he made a movie out of this in the 1970s. The word Khala means impotence and it's about a Senegalese businessman who suffers about impotence on his wedding night and he wastes away his fortune trying to find out who cursed him because of course it has to be a magical curse. This sounds really interesting. I started reading it and it's really bad. It's very poorly written. It's obviously not very long. I may finish it someday but wow was it ever bad. Unfortunately I don't think I made the greatest choices when it comes to African authors. There are some new and recent authors who have written some modern science fiction. African authors who have written some modern science fiction and I'll continue looking for those. In the meantime I'm going to tag some people for this book tag. This is the first time I've done this. Number one I'm going to tag Pac Billy because he is one of my oldest viewers and he comments all the time and he hasn't made any videos in like a year so he needs to get busy. Next I'm going to tag the androids conundrum because I think she would appreciate the nature of this book tag. I think she would find it very interesting. Now she said that she doesn't do book tags but she said that while she was doing a book tag so there and finally I'm going to tag Christina Horner because she has a gigantic audience and I really want to get a link from her someday. Look for some other book reviews soon. Bye. You can support 30 Seconds Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below and visit the 30 Seconds Sci-Fi Tumblr. That's my headquarters. In addition to my videos I publish links and updates there every day.