Under the Dome
by Stephen King · first published 2009
9% recommend73% neutral18% critical
Under the Dome is a 2009 science fiction novel by the American author, Stephen King. Under the Dome is the 58th book published by Stephen King, and it is his 48th novel. The novel focuses on a small Maine town, and tells an intricate, multi-character, alternating perspective story of how the town's inhabitants contend with the calamity of being suddenly cut off from the outside world by an impassable, invisible glass dome-like barrier that seemingly falls out of the sky, transforming the community into a domed city.
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Maybe not as high brow as some of the other suggestions here but I really enjoyed Stephen King's Under The Dome. It's basically a story of small town political corruption and the human tendency to be easily exploited by dictatorial types in a crisis.
on “Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?” ↗Off-the-shelf retail prices for books are insane. $20 for a large-format paperback of Under the Dome? Please. Perhaps the new model for physical bookstores should be that of a private library, except without the checkout aspect. The main income comes from impulse buys of high-margin foodstuffs and…
on “The Future of Bookstores: Lead-Gen, not Dead Trees” ↗…exists, or if we really are just small groups of self-centered "tribes" with sets of overlapping goals...until they aren't. Fiction writers have made extensive use of this tenuous balance as a plot point. "Under the Dome" by Stephen King comes immediately to mind as one recent example. Once the "boundary" goes up, the town's social order falls apart surprisingly fast (within days, even though power, water, food, and services…
on “Baltimore Residents Begin Clearing Debris After Night of Riots” ↗…guess, the answer is "it depends." I tend to read fiction cover to cover, and if it's short enough (the average Dean Koontz novel, for example) I often read it one sitting. A Stephen King novel like Under The Dome might take 2-3 sittings. Non-fiction is a different story. I tend to read business books cover to cover (relative to a span of time, like say a week or two), but I interleave reading multiple books…
on “Ask HN: Do hackers (you) read books cover to cover?” ↗I would also add to this list audible.com which restricts certain books to US only. I am a platinum subscriber to audible, however, I couldn't get my hands on Stephen King's Under The Dome. So I got it from the thepiratebay pretty much on the next day. I did buy other King's books on audible though.
on “Why I get my entertainment via BitTorrent” ↗If Stephen King were still self-publishing, Under the Dome would have been 500 pages longer than it already is. Thank God there's an editor to tell him to keep it "short". Also, there were speculations a few months ago that J.K. Rowling was planning to do something…
on “Google eBookstore seems to have been launched” ↗…Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" Anyway, in the case of King, it's too bad he isn't as good at endings as he is at beginnings. Under The Dome was, IMO, a particularly strong example of a really interesting story that just fell apart in the last page or two. And, of course, the Dark Tower series and the fizzle-flop ending of that. That said,…
on “Why Stephen King Spends 'Months and Even Years' Writing Opening Sentences” ↗I thought you meant reading one thing while listing to a different audiobook. (I sometimes do this, and read your post while listening to Stephen King's Under the Dome, but I have to pause to respond. I can listen and read, but not listen and write.) Anyway, I know a few people who often switch between reading the text and listening to the audio of a book. If your…
on “Show HN: Read while you listen to your Audiobooks” ↗…single individual in a limited setting (so, pretty boring, but we are not measuring quality of plot), a SOTA model can keep it coherent? I dunno how it would do with something like Stephen King's IT or Under the Dome (multiple parallel plots over 450k words, involving multiple main characters, with events on every single page needing to be coherent with the rest of the book), but before we even get there, standard…
on “Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met” ↗I remember when "Under the Dome" was selling wholesale (Hardcover) for $13 and I ended up buying it from Walmart for $6.99 - because (A) it was $3.00 less than the eBook, and (B), well, I then could, in theory, resell the book. It's…
on “Plot Thickens as 900 Writers Battle Amazon” ↗I'm noticing this while reading Under the Dome. There are many sentences where I just stop at the last couple words because the sentence doesn't make sense at that point. Quite a few times I thought they were typos. When I analyze the sentence though…
on “Garden path sentence” ↗…the freedom to determine what price they could sell it to their customer at - even if it was below they price they were purchasing it at. You don't think Amazon/WalMart/Target forced Scribner to sell "Under the Dome" for $9, do you? Hardcover releases are typically sold at a 47 percent discount, Under the Dome has a list of $35, so amazon probably paid around $18.00 for that, and turned around and sold it to their…
on “Amazon indicates they'll accept Macmillan's terms” ↗I'm reading Under the Dome right now. After this I'm thinking of starting The Gunslinger.
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading?” ↗