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Book Foo, some TV stuff.
Sep. 25th, 2010 01:57 pmFinished: The Dreaming Void, by Peter F. Hamilton
Not bad. Dreaming Void is in the same universe as Hamilton's "Pandora Star" and "Judas Unchained", but about 1000 years later. However, because people routinely live for centuries, a few familiar characters do appear including ( Read more... ). I guess I enjoyed it... I had the same problem I have with a lot of his works - there's some cool ideas and SF concepts, but I don't find myself drawn in by many of the characters. And plotwise there's a bit of a problem for me (minor spoilers) ( Read more... )
Started and Finished: Tesseracts edited by Judith Merrill (and signed by her!) (short story collection)
Started: Tesseracts 3 (short story collection)
Tesseracts claim to fame is that it's an anthology of Canadian science fiction. And poetry. About half the entries are poems (but each only takes up about one page, compared to the stories which take up 20-30 or more, so the poetry's not overpowering). I'm not a big poetry fan, so for the most part I'd have preferred if they just left them out, but whatever.
The collection's not bad. I do think some of the stories weren't the greatest quality. I don't know, but there's a certain 'type' of short story that there seemed to be a couple of examples in the collection (some might have been poetry)... where it's like "This is a wacky planet, and wacky things happen here for no particular reason", and it's literally just a list of the ways that this alien planet is different from ours, sometimes just literally the opposite of our world, and often are quite stupid ('People don't take medicine when they're sick, they take medicine when they're healthy!') (This is not saying anything about preventative medicine, the way it was in the book was just basically backwardsland). I don't think I liked a single one of these, and thought they should have just been left out. But there were a few good stories. I liked William Gibson's submission "Hinterlands", as well as Elisabeth Vonaburg's "Home by the Sea", A. K. Dewdeny's "2DWorld", and Spider Robinson's "God is an Iron".
And of course, it's worth owning just for Judith Merril's signature. For those who aren't familiar with the name, she's one of the early female SF authors, and wrote some of the classics in the genre, and even though she's probably better known as an anthologist, what she wrote herself was still influential. "That Only a Mother" (about the horrors of atomic-power-related mutations... it was the 40s), is still regularly in short story collections. She's not a born Canadian, but came here to escape the Vietnam war, and wound up staying. She donated her entire collection of SF to the library in Toronto, to start the "Spaced Out Collection of Science Fiction" (later renamed The Merrill Collection, the very place I met Karl Schroeder for a writing workshop back in February). In the early 80s, she used to host the Canadian broadcasts of Doctor Who, and in the 90s I regularly saw her interviewed on Prisoners of Gravity. So as a SF geek, I'm thrilled by unexpectedly getting a signed copy of a book she edited, and for only $1, too.
Tesseracts 3 (and 2 and others) were edited by somebody else, her suggestion was each volume be edited by new people to provide different voices.
Finished: Blindsight, by Peter Watts (reread)
Started: The Gunslinger: Dark Tower I, by Stephen King (reread)
Blindsight was great as usual. I can't say enough how much I enjoy the book, it's quickly become one of my favorites. Glad Watts won a Hugo for a short story this year, but he really should have won for this when it came out. Oh well, maybe the sidequel
-
So, new TV started. What's been on? Well, lots, but being discussed here (spoilers will be behind cuts):
The Event: I was ambivalent about the series when I first heard about it, and I still am. I suppose in one area I'm a little more reassured, but overall, still Wait and See. ( Read more... )
Fringe: Premiere didn't blow me away, but it was better than last season's. I liked it, just not wild about it. I kind of wanted to see ( Read more... )
Supernatural: Kind of meh, overall. Have to see where it goes.
Was there anything else? I don't think so, at least nothing that I feel needs a comment. Coming this week, Stargate Universe and No Ordinary Family.
Not bad. Dreaming Void is in the same universe as Hamilton's "Pandora Star" and "Judas Unchained", but about 1000 years later. However, because people routinely live for centuries, a few familiar characters do appear including ( Read more... ). I guess I enjoyed it... I had the same problem I have with a lot of his works - there's some cool ideas and SF concepts, but I don't find myself drawn in by many of the characters. And plotwise there's a bit of a problem for me (minor spoilers) ( Read more... )
Started and Finished: Tesseracts edited by Judith Merrill (and signed by her!) (short story collection)
Started: Tesseracts 3 (short story collection)
Tesseracts claim to fame is that it's an anthology of Canadian science fiction. And poetry. About half the entries are poems (but each only takes up about one page, compared to the stories which take up 20-30 or more, so the poetry's not overpowering). I'm not a big poetry fan, so for the most part I'd have preferred if they just left them out, but whatever.
The collection's not bad. I do think some of the stories weren't the greatest quality. I don't know, but there's a certain 'type' of short story that there seemed to be a couple of examples in the collection (some might have been poetry)... where it's like "This is a wacky planet, and wacky things happen here for no particular reason", and it's literally just a list of the ways that this alien planet is different from ours, sometimes just literally the opposite of our world, and often are quite stupid ('People don't take medicine when they're sick, they take medicine when they're healthy!') (This is not saying anything about preventative medicine, the way it was in the book was just basically backwardsland). I don't think I liked a single one of these, and thought they should have just been left out. But there were a few good stories. I liked William Gibson's submission "Hinterlands", as well as Elisabeth Vonaburg's "Home by the Sea", A. K. Dewdeny's "2DWorld", and Spider Robinson's "God is an Iron".
And of course, it's worth owning just for Judith Merril's signature. For those who aren't familiar with the name, she's one of the early female SF authors, and wrote some of the classics in the genre, and even though she's probably better known as an anthologist, what she wrote herself was still influential. "That Only a Mother" (about the horrors of atomic-power-related mutations... it was the 40s), is still regularly in short story collections. She's not a born Canadian, but came here to escape the Vietnam war, and wound up staying. She donated her entire collection of SF to the library in Toronto, to start the "Spaced Out Collection of Science Fiction" (later renamed The Merrill Collection, the very place I met Karl Schroeder for a writing workshop back in February). In the early 80s, she used to host the Canadian broadcasts of Doctor Who, and in the 90s I regularly saw her interviewed on Prisoners of Gravity. So as a SF geek, I'm thrilled by unexpectedly getting a signed copy of a book she edited, and for only $1, too.
Tesseracts 3 (and 2 and others) were edited by somebody else, her suggestion was each volume be edited by new people to provide different voices.
Finished: Blindsight, by Peter Watts (reread)
Started: The Gunslinger: Dark Tower I, by Stephen King (reread)
Blindsight was great as usual. I can't say enough how much I enjoy the book, it's quickly become one of my favorites. Glad Watts won a Hugo for a short story this year, but he really should have won for this when it came out. Oh well, maybe the sidequel
-
So, new TV started. What's been on? Well, lots, but being discussed here (spoilers will be behind cuts):
The Event: I was ambivalent about the series when I first heard about it, and I still am. I suppose in one area I'm a little more reassured, but overall, still Wait and See. ( Read more... )
Fringe: Premiere didn't blow me away, but it was better than last season's. I liked it, just not wild about it. I kind of wanted to see ( Read more... )
Supernatural: Kind of meh, overall. Have to see where it goes.
Was there anything else? I don't think so, at least nothing that I feel needs a comment. Coming this week, Stargate Universe and No Ordinary Family.
