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newnumber6First, on my back... last time I posted about it, my back was still in pain and slowly getting better. Well, since that time, I had a backslide setback relapse, and it went worse than ever... I think it was mainly that I strained other muscles while trying to avoid using the ones that were hurt. Anyway, there were a few days where I had trouble sleeping comfortably, and even when I did, I'd wake up hardly able to move for a few minutes.
But I'm pleased to announce I'm now probably about 95%back to normal recovered (well, closer to 94.82900042%, but who's counting). So, yay! And I didn't miss any work.
Woke up from a dream last night with the sensation that there was something very important that I'd forgotten about. I think it was just dream-fog (or the thing that I'd forgotten was something in the dream itself), but still, unpleasant. :). Also a while ago had a dream that my cousin was harboring an alien that was crafted by other aliens for first contact situations, and that for some reason it (the alien) was buttering lettuce. Then later she (the cousin) tried to borrow money from me and we got into a bit of an argument before finally I gave it to her. I don't know where that came from.
Otherwise, well, been pretty blah lately, depression kicking me a bit hard, feeling exceptionally wistful for no good reason.
However, there are always books.
Finished: The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge
The book I've waited over a decade for, finally read. It's more than a little hard to judge it objectively.
Let me start by saying that though there were flaws, this is probably the most satisfying (in one sense) "long-awaited" sequel in recent memory. It didn't have everything I wanted (but I knew the big thing I wanted that it didn't have going in), but as I was reading it I was occasionally excited, heartbroken, relieved, elated at a sudden connection I didn't make but probably should have, and ultimately wanting more. The last part is a bit of a flaw, because the book does leave on a big open-ended point... not a cliffhanger, per se, but with enough still going on that really needs to be addressed that, unlike A Fire Upon the Deep alone (which also had some stuff up in the air), if the story ended here, it will feel distinctly uncompleted. It reads, in fact, like the first book of a trilogy than a stand-alone sequel (and it might in fact be intended that way, though I don't think there's been an announcement).
A tiny bit more detailed behind the cut, not very spoilery, but a little (and I'm conscious that unlike most of my reviews, a few people on my flist actually are intending to read this in the near future). One of the highlight of A Fire Upon the Deep was the exploration of the Tines unique life-style (being hive mind organisms), and this gets explored in much more detail here, with Vinge making some really clever extrapolations, and a few genuine twists that I was lead in one direction and later realized it meant something completely different, in a really cool way. Not to mention the idea from the first book about changing members changing the soul and character of the pack, coming into play a lot more than it did in the first book.
The emotional connection with the characters from previous book really did come into play here, with some characters making choices (or suffering fates) that, if they were just a new character in a book, I wouldn't care much about, but because I'd read and reread their adventures in the first book, really got an intense reaction, for good or bad, to the point where I was breathlessly thinking 'Oh, no!' or 'Yes!' or the like t some revelation or another.
Some of the newer characters fared a little less well, a couple of them veering into cartoon-villainy territory, but, I still enjoyed it. One of the central conflicts in the book is kind of cool, but sometimes I felt that there were some key, persuasive arguments that just don't seem to be used, and this problem seemed echoed in smaller ways even in unrelated plots - a couple instances where if people just made the most obvious points they should be making, you'd think that they might be believed, and it feels almost like the writer's deliberately avoiding the characters doing this because it would wreck the story. It's not a fatal flaw, and on a first read the book moves along at a good enough pace that I don't have to reflect much on it, but it's possible that it'll sour rereads a little.
And, also, as I said above, I knew going in that a certain element wasn't going to be a big part of the book... you can probably tell which element from the plot descriptions, in fact... but if you're really expecting those elements and really want them, you might find yourself a little disappointed. There's hope for sequels, though.
Although I think I liked Children of the Sky more than Vinge's previous work, Rainbows End, which I also liked an awful lot, I think AFutD and A Deepness in the Sky are probably both slightly better books. Still, Children is a worthy addition. AS LONG AS THERE IS A SEQUEL. DO YOU HEAR ME VERNOR VINGE? I KNOW YOU GOOGLE YOURSELF. OR AT LEAST I ASSUME YOU DO IF YOU'RE READING THIS. THERE BETTER BE A SEQUEL. OR THERE WILL BE GEEK RAGE.
Finished: Dark Light by Ken Macleod
This was book two of a series, and, to be honest, it didn't really do much for me, certainly not compared
to the first. Part of this might be my own fault - I had ideas about what was going on in the first book
and they turned out to be wrong, which is okay, but I would have been more interested in exploring the ideas I thought were going on than the ones that were. But more generally, I don't know... it just felt
somewhat by the numbers. The characters had a goal. There were obstacles. Those obstacles had to be overcome... but rather than feeling like it meant much, flowing like a story should, to me it felt like... well, the best way I can think of to describe it is... say you had a book with a group of scientists inventing a time machine (the story has nothing to do with such, this is just an illustration). The story isn't actually about the invention of the time machine, it's about what they do with it, but there's a certain amount of setup time, where the characters work on the time machine, have a stumbling block, then work around it and ta-da, success. It's not the main story, it's just a couple chapters at the beginning to illustrate how hard it is for them to do what had to be done to get to the story, and there's no real sensation of stakes. Except in this case, it IS the story. There's a little bit of other stuff happening, but I never really warmed to most of it, the most interesting being (slight spoilers) some secondary characters having a gender/sex divergence, since 'males' are defined as the ones who fight and kill, and women have specific roles, but it doesn't really matter what genitals you're born with as to whether you're defined as a man or woman in their society, and an interesting discussion about ethics on tinkering with civilizations when the next time you return to it, months'll have passed for you, but decades for them, but mostly I just wanted them to get to the big idea and the stuff that followed from it.
Which I guess isn't such a huge flaw in the middle book of a trilogy, but still, kind of blah. I'll read the third book, but I'm not as gung ho as I was earlier.
Finished: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
It's being made into a movie, and the trailer's already been released, so a brief plot outline's probably unnecessary... but, what the hell. The Hunger Games takes place in the future, after the collapse of the US, in the country of Panem, comprised of the wealthy Capitol and twelve Districts of varying wealth, but with many that are pretty well struggling to survive.
Every year, each District must send two people from age 12 to 18, randomly selected or volunteers, to compete in the Hunger Games, where all the competitors must fight to the death, essentially on reality TV, until there is only one survivor. The story follows Katniss Everdeen, one of the competitors from the poorest district.
Some might feel some similarity to another book I've read and commented on here quite often, the Japanese novel Battle Royale, but let's discuss the book on its own merits first.
Overall, I did enjoy it. It did feel a little weak in areas, and it's a young adult novel so much of that can be forgiven, but it kind of made me roll my eyes in a couple spots because of what I felt was poor plotting and not-all-that-great science fiction. The target audience probably won't find a problem with it, but it did make it a little less enjoyable. Specifically (not huge spoilers, but some details discussed vaguely) a lot of times the author seems to pull random bit of high technology out to either solve a particular problem or make a particular image (and you have to wonder if they have all this high technology, how are they surviving?), or to move the plot along and force things to happen in a certain way. It's not AS bad as this, but it's kind of in the vein of "The only way I could get out of that situation was if I could fly. Luckily, I spotted a genetically engineered eagle egg in a tree... when you eat those, you gain the ability to sprout wings and fly for a few feet." If someone gets seriously injured, there's a way to cure it that's either ultra convenient or a plot point in retrieving it, but once retrieved is still ultra convenient. Like, there's a genetically engineered creature with venom that does debilitating things, but there also happens to be a naturally occuring herb that clears that right up! What are the odds? If things get slow, woops, random complication or rule change thrown in by the people running the games. Sort of my old nemesis, 'Just So' writing. Why does this happen in this way? "Just So" result-X-desired-by-the-writer happens. It doesn't have any narrative power of needing to happen on its own.
That said, I've seen worse examples in things I enjoyed. The other problem was that except for two or three characters, few people in the book seemed to come alive, particularly the competitors in the game. More on that later.
Still, on the whole, it was an enjoyable book, and easy to read, and I find I do actually look forward to seeing the movie (which, judging by the trailer, looks like it's going to be pretty faithful actually). I'll also be reading the sequel if I can find it, and probably the rest of the series.
Now, despite the similarities of plots, I do genuinely believe that Hunger Games and Battle Royale both came up with the idea of 'teenagers fighting to the death because the government says so' independently (and even if not, Hunger Games puts a different enough twist on it). However, because of the similarity in the 'high concept', comparisons are probably inevitable.
So, let's compare, shall we?
Hunger Games gets an easy win in terms of readability and the flow of the text. That's not entirely fair though because I've only read Battle Royale in translation from the original Japanese, so if it felt stilted it might have just been because of the translator, or because there were hard-to-translate elements, and maybe in Japanese it's just as smooth. If I ever develop Doug Ramsey's mutant power, I'll let you know.
Battle Royale comes away the victor in two other areas, though... (some minor spoilers for both books, but mostly cut for length) One, as mentioned above, is the characters, especially the characters in the game. HG has 24 contestants, and I felt like I got to know 3, maybe 4 if you count 'half' of a couple characters. Everybody else is pretty well a cipher or fodder. Battle Royale had 42 students, and with a couple exceptions, I felt like I knew a little about every character, and we got to see (almost) every death, that it mattered in some small way. Maybe Katniss and Peeta and Rue feel a little more developed than Shuya and Noriko and Shogo... but not a LOT.
In Battle Royale, part of this was because of the setup... their game took a class of people who already knew each other, so you could explore relationships from a number of different directions... characters would be reacting to deaths and giving us a little more context of their relationships, whereas except for Peeta, our viewpoint character had never seen any of the other tributes before being selected, so how could she learn much about them? Still, I think the author could have done a better job with the pre-game part of the story introducing us to them, giving us something to hang on to when we met them in the arena, to root for them or sympathize or fear. The big threats of the arena might as well have been faceless soldiers in a video game.
The other way Battle Royale wins is in what I like to think of as 'put yourself there' aspect. The ability to immerse yourself and imagine yourself in the same situation. Battle Royale's beautiful for
this, you can picture one of your classes, or your group of friends, imagine you're forced into the situation and given random weapons, and try to figure out who you'd team up with, who you'd trust, how you think everybody would react, what your strategy would be. You can do it with Hunger Games, sure, imagine you live in this world, and got selected... but for most of us we face the fact that the other players will be better than we are, and we'd probably die. It's like the difference between a zombie apocalypse movie and a werewolf movie - a werewolf, you realize you're probably going to die if the werewolf were to jump in front of you. So yeah, it's scary, but it's hard to put yourself in the situation. But a zombie movie, you know you can probably outrun a zombie, you could probably find a way to barricade yourself in against a horde for a little while, you might be able to distract them to get out and find some food... this is why zombie stories are so satisfying for me, they facilitate your imagining another world for yourself. Similarly, the Hunger Games' tendency to just throw out random crap to alter the game or world as the plot demands, if you were putting yourself in the situation, you can make up such situations yourself, but it feels like cheating, whereas the Battle Royale world just is... you're in a situation and all you have to imagine is how YOU deal with it. It's a good story and a perfect vehicle for lying around and imagining (or in my case as often as not, walking to work and imagining) long after you put the book down.
I also think Battle Royale was better plotted, as mentioned above, Hunger Games has too many 'random sudden complication', whereas Battle Royale everything seems to come naturally as a result of what everybody's doing.
So, I still think I like Battle Royale more, and it depresses me a little that the Hunger Games movie all but kills the chances for a US adaptation of Battle Royale (which probably marks me a a heathen to some for wanting one, heck, I even wrote my own script, mostly for practice but that I think would both make a good movie and be surprisingly faithful to the book). Oh well, that's life.
Started: Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge
Started: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
Christmas doldrums TV wise, Walking Dead gone for a couple months, next thing to be excited about is the Doctor Who Xmas special I guess.
And man, only a few weeks till Xmas already? :P. Oh, speaking of, learned that this year, for a change and a break from the cooking for those who usually do that, we'll be having our Xmas dinner at an all you can eat Chinese buffet. Which is kind of awesome actually, because we did just have Turkey and such at Thanksgiving in October and haven't gone to one of those buffets in years. I expect to stuff my face.
But I'm pleased to announce I'm now probably about 95%
Woke up from a dream last night with the sensation that there was something very important that I'd forgotten about. I think it was just dream-fog (or the thing that I'd forgotten was something in the dream itself), but still, unpleasant. :). Also a while ago had a dream that my cousin was harboring an alien that was crafted by other aliens for first contact situations, and that for some reason it (the alien) was buttering lettuce. Then later she (the cousin) tried to borrow money from me and we got into a bit of an argument before finally I gave it to her. I don't know where that came from.
Otherwise, well, been pretty blah lately, depression kicking me a bit hard, feeling exceptionally wistful for no good reason.
However, there are always books.
Finished: The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge
The book I've waited over a decade for, finally read. It's more than a little hard to judge it objectively.
Let me start by saying that though there were flaws, this is probably the most satisfying (in one sense) "long-awaited" sequel in recent memory. It didn't have everything I wanted (but I knew the big thing I wanted that it didn't have going in), but as I was reading it I was occasionally excited, heartbroken, relieved, elated at a sudden connection I didn't make but probably should have, and ultimately wanting more. The last part is a bit of a flaw, because the book does leave on a big open-ended point... not a cliffhanger, per se, but with enough still going on that really needs to be addressed that, unlike A Fire Upon the Deep alone (which also had some stuff up in the air), if the story ended here, it will feel distinctly uncompleted. It reads, in fact, like the first book of a trilogy than a stand-alone sequel (and it might in fact be intended that way, though I don't think there's been an announcement).
A tiny bit more detailed behind the cut, not very spoilery, but a little (and I'm conscious that unlike most of my reviews, a few people on my flist actually are intending to read this in the near future). One of the highlight of A Fire Upon the Deep was the exploration of the Tines unique life-style (being hive mind organisms), and this gets explored in much more detail here, with Vinge making some really clever extrapolations, and a few genuine twists that I was lead in one direction and later realized it meant something completely different, in a really cool way. Not to mention the idea from the first book about changing members changing the soul and character of the pack, coming into play a lot more than it did in the first book.
The emotional connection with the characters from previous book really did come into play here, with some characters making choices (or suffering fates) that, if they were just a new character in a book, I wouldn't care much about, but because I'd read and reread their adventures in the first book, really got an intense reaction, for good or bad, to the point where I was breathlessly thinking 'Oh, no!' or 'Yes!' or the like t some revelation or another.
Some of the newer characters fared a little less well, a couple of them veering into cartoon-villainy territory, but, I still enjoyed it. One of the central conflicts in the book is kind of cool, but sometimes I felt that there were some key, persuasive arguments that just don't seem to be used, and this problem seemed echoed in smaller ways even in unrelated plots - a couple instances where if people just made the most obvious points they should be making, you'd think that they might be believed, and it feels almost like the writer's deliberately avoiding the characters doing this because it would wreck the story. It's not a fatal flaw, and on a first read the book moves along at a good enough pace that I don't have to reflect much on it, but it's possible that it'll sour rereads a little.
And, also, as I said above, I knew going in that a certain element wasn't going to be a big part of the book... you can probably tell which element from the plot descriptions, in fact... but if you're really expecting those elements and really want them, you might find yourself a little disappointed. There's hope for sequels, though.
Although I think I liked Children of the Sky more than Vinge's previous work, Rainbows End, which I also liked an awful lot, I think AFutD and A Deepness in the Sky are probably both slightly better books. Still, Children is a worthy addition. AS LONG AS THERE IS A SEQUEL. DO YOU HEAR ME VERNOR VINGE? I KNOW YOU GOOGLE YOURSELF. OR AT LEAST I ASSUME YOU DO IF YOU'RE READING THIS. THERE BETTER BE A SEQUEL. OR THERE WILL BE GEEK RAGE.
Finished: Dark Light by Ken Macleod
This was book two of a series, and, to be honest, it didn't really do much for me, certainly not compared
to the first. Part of this might be my own fault - I had ideas about what was going on in the first book
and they turned out to be wrong, which is okay, but I would have been more interested in exploring the ideas I thought were going on than the ones that were. But more generally, I don't know... it just felt
somewhat by the numbers. The characters had a goal. There were obstacles. Those obstacles had to be overcome... but rather than feeling like it meant much, flowing like a story should, to me it felt like... well, the best way I can think of to describe it is... say you had a book with a group of scientists inventing a time machine (the story has nothing to do with such, this is just an illustration). The story isn't actually about the invention of the time machine, it's about what they do with it, but there's a certain amount of setup time, where the characters work on the time machine, have a stumbling block, then work around it and ta-da, success. It's not the main story, it's just a couple chapters at the beginning to illustrate how hard it is for them to do what had to be done to get to the story, and there's no real sensation of stakes. Except in this case, it IS the story. There's a little bit of other stuff happening, but I never really warmed to most of it, the most interesting being (slight spoilers) some secondary characters having a gender/sex divergence, since 'males' are defined as the ones who fight and kill, and women have specific roles, but it doesn't really matter what genitals you're born with as to whether you're defined as a man or woman in their society, and an interesting discussion about ethics on tinkering with civilizations when the next time you return to it, months'll have passed for you, but decades for them, but mostly I just wanted them to get to the big idea and the stuff that followed from it.
Which I guess isn't such a huge flaw in the middle book of a trilogy, but still, kind of blah. I'll read the third book, but I'm not as gung ho as I was earlier.
Finished: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
It's being made into a movie, and the trailer's already been released, so a brief plot outline's probably unnecessary... but, what the hell. The Hunger Games takes place in the future, after the collapse of the US, in the country of Panem, comprised of the wealthy Capitol and twelve Districts of varying wealth, but with many that are pretty well struggling to survive.
Every year, each District must send two people from age 12 to 18, randomly selected or volunteers, to compete in the Hunger Games, where all the competitors must fight to the death, essentially on reality TV, until there is only one survivor. The story follows Katniss Everdeen, one of the competitors from the poorest district.
Some might feel some similarity to another book I've read and commented on here quite often, the Japanese novel Battle Royale, but let's discuss the book on its own merits first.
Overall, I did enjoy it. It did feel a little weak in areas, and it's a young adult novel so much of that can be forgiven, but it kind of made me roll my eyes in a couple spots because of what I felt was poor plotting and not-all-that-great science fiction. The target audience probably won't find a problem with it, but it did make it a little less enjoyable. Specifically (not huge spoilers, but some details discussed vaguely) a lot of times the author seems to pull random bit of high technology out to either solve a particular problem or make a particular image (and you have to wonder if they have all this high technology, how are they surviving?), or to move the plot along and force things to happen in a certain way. It's not AS bad as this, but it's kind of in the vein of "The only way I could get out of that situation was if I could fly. Luckily, I spotted a genetically engineered eagle egg in a tree... when you eat those, you gain the ability to sprout wings and fly for a few feet." If someone gets seriously injured, there's a way to cure it that's either ultra convenient or a plot point in retrieving it, but once retrieved is still ultra convenient. Like, there's a genetically engineered creature with venom that does debilitating things, but there also happens to be a naturally occuring herb that clears that right up! What are the odds? If things get slow, woops, random complication or rule change thrown in by the people running the games. Sort of my old nemesis, 'Just So' writing. Why does this happen in this way? "Just So" result-X-desired-by-the-writer happens. It doesn't have any narrative power of needing to happen on its own.
That said, I've seen worse examples in things I enjoyed. The other problem was that except for two or three characters, few people in the book seemed to come alive, particularly the competitors in the game. More on that later.
Still, on the whole, it was an enjoyable book, and easy to read, and I find I do actually look forward to seeing the movie (which, judging by the trailer, looks like it's going to be pretty faithful actually). I'll also be reading the sequel if I can find it, and probably the rest of the series.
Now, despite the similarities of plots, I do genuinely believe that Hunger Games and Battle Royale both came up with the idea of 'teenagers fighting to the death because the government says so' independently (and even if not, Hunger Games puts a different enough twist on it). However, because of the similarity in the 'high concept', comparisons are probably inevitable.
So, let's compare, shall we?
Hunger Games gets an easy win in terms of readability and the flow of the text. That's not entirely fair though because I've only read Battle Royale in translation from the original Japanese, so if it felt stilted it might have just been because of the translator, or because there were hard-to-translate elements, and maybe in Japanese it's just as smooth. If I ever develop Doug Ramsey's mutant power, I'll let you know.
Battle Royale comes away the victor in two other areas, though... (some minor spoilers for both books, but mostly cut for length) One, as mentioned above, is the characters, especially the characters in the game. HG has 24 contestants, and I felt like I got to know 3, maybe 4 if you count 'half' of a couple characters. Everybody else is pretty well a cipher or fodder. Battle Royale had 42 students, and with a couple exceptions, I felt like I knew a little about every character, and we got to see (almost) every death, that it mattered in some small way. Maybe Katniss and Peeta and Rue feel a little more developed than Shuya and Noriko and Shogo... but not a LOT.
In Battle Royale, part of this was because of the setup... their game took a class of people who already knew each other, so you could explore relationships from a number of different directions... characters would be reacting to deaths and giving us a little more context of their relationships, whereas except for Peeta, our viewpoint character had never seen any of the other tributes before being selected, so how could she learn much about them? Still, I think the author could have done a better job with the pre-game part of the story introducing us to them, giving us something to hang on to when we met them in the arena, to root for them or sympathize or fear. The big threats of the arena might as well have been faceless soldiers in a video game.
The other way Battle Royale wins is in what I like to think of as 'put yourself there' aspect. The ability to immerse yourself and imagine yourself in the same situation. Battle Royale's beautiful for
this, you can picture one of your classes, or your group of friends, imagine you're forced into the situation and given random weapons, and try to figure out who you'd team up with, who you'd trust, how you think everybody would react, what your strategy would be. You can do it with Hunger Games, sure, imagine you live in this world, and got selected... but for most of us we face the fact that the other players will be better than we are, and we'd probably die. It's like the difference between a zombie apocalypse movie and a werewolf movie - a werewolf, you realize you're probably going to die if the werewolf were to jump in front of you. So yeah, it's scary, but it's hard to put yourself in the situation. But a zombie movie, you know you can probably outrun a zombie, you could probably find a way to barricade yourself in against a horde for a little while, you might be able to distract them to get out and find some food... this is why zombie stories are so satisfying for me, they facilitate your imagining another world for yourself. Similarly, the Hunger Games' tendency to just throw out random crap to alter the game or world as the plot demands, if you were putting yourself in the situation, you can make up such situations yourself, but it feels like cheating, whereas the Battle Royale world just is... you're in a situation and all you have to imagine is how YOU deal with it. It's a good story and a perfect vehicle for lying around and imagining (or in my case as often as not, walking to work and imagining) long after you put the book down.
I also think Battle Royale was better plotted, as mentioned above, Hunger Games has too many 'random sudden complication', whereas Battle Royale everything seems to come naturally as a result of what everybody's doing.
So, I still think I like Battle Royale more, and it depresses me a little that the Hunger Games movie all but kills the chances for a US adaptation of Battle Royale (which probably marks me a a heathen to some for wanting one, heck, I even wrote my own script, mostly for practice but that I think would both make a good movie and be surprisingly faithful to the book). Oh well, that's life.
Started: Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge
Started: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
Christmas doldrums TV wise, Walking Dead gone for a couple months, next thing to be excited about is the Doctor Who Xmas special I guess.
And man, only a few weeks till Xmas already? :P. Oh, speaking of, learned that this year, for a change and a break from the cooking for those who usually do that, we'll be having our Xmas dinner at an all you can eat Chinese buffet. Which is kind of awesome actually, because we did just have Turkey and such at Thanksgiving in October and haven't gone to one of those buffets in years. I expect to stuff my face.
