Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Finished reading my book.Very very funny, and in the best way possible, or at least, the way that most appeals to me. Totally irreverant... I believe thats the right word.
I know what comes to mind... old Warner Brothers or Hanna Barbera Cartoons... though not for any of the reasons you might think.
Ah bollox... I can't really say anything about it without totally spoiling it for anyone who might read it (assuming I haven't already). Suffice to say it really appeals to my sense of humour, and more so, to my twisted sense of esthetics.
I haven't grinned so much in ages.
Labels: books
Steve 3:13 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, October 11, 2004
I'm reading the latest book by my favourite author... oh yeah... I'm slightly drunk, so excuse any more extreme than usual typos.Anyway... I'm not gonna say who the author is, or what the book's called, coz I'm about to toss out a huge spoiler, and that would just ruin it for anyone who happened to be reading it. There's logic in there somewhere... trust me.
So you have this race of truly ancient aliens living in gas giant planets all round the galaxy who live for billions of years... not just the race, but the individuals. Okay, anyone actually reading the same book knows exactly what I'm talking about, so if you havent reached half way yet, stop reading right now.
Anyone left?
All of you... good. I'll continue.
So, they're ancient, and wise beyond your imagination, and a bunch of drunken cantankerous, bumbling, seemingly incompetant, awkward old gits who never tell the truth about anything when they can tell a perfectly good lie, since no-one else has been around long enough to tell them its not true.
Anyway.
Picture the scene... they're holding a race (it just happens to be being held in the middle of a war zone, but thats beside the point right now) and the racing craft are kinda like sailing ships that catch the 'wind', sailing round the inside edge of a great storm... like the red spot on jupiter. Gambling on the outcome is a big thing.
So, the race is underway, when out of no-where come a load of high tech space craft from the local stellar system (I wont go into why this is happening, but suffice to say these craft are pretty heavy duty shit).
The initial response of the gas giant aliens is to fire on the hi-tech craft with the equvalient of world war one battleships. Needless to say, these got well and truly creamed.
So just when you think all is lost, coz they're so obviously outclassed, a fleet of super hi-tech souped up ww1 style warships come steaming in through the wall of the storm, like the cavalry coming to the rescue, and you think 'okay, maybe they have a chance', only for the invading craft to hurl a load of nukes at them. (Remember, this is all happening at a race meeting, so the aliens start taking bets on who's gonna win.)
Battleships duly nuked, you think its all over, when out of the depths of the gas giant's atmosphere comes a small planet sized... 'thing'... that simply blows all the hi-tech invading ships to shit in a matter of half a second.
Aaaanyway.... entertaining as all this is, the bit that really cracked me up, after hundreds, or maybe even thousands of lives have been lost.... the response of the gas giant aliens was to wonder if the race was gonna continue, or be postponed, and would their bets be honoured?
Good stuff. This guy never fails to make me laugh.
Labels: books
Steve 8:59 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, May 28, 2004
I finished reading dead Lines, at last.Interesting... very interesting.
It's not a horror, or even a chiller really.
Very thought provoking though. It ponders quite effectively the question of what happens to us when we die, where we go, how we get there, and what would happen if some new technology dissrupted that transition.
Unlike his best work though, it was hard to suspend disbelief. The idea was better than the execution, The visuals were good, if that makes sense when describing a book, but the bones of the idea poked through the flesh of the characters and story.
Still, if like me you don't conform to any recognised religion, don't buy the idea that when you die you go to heaven, but do think there's 'something' other than what we know in life, then it's worth a read... if only for a variation on an old idea to toy with for a while.
Labels: books
Steve 9:38 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 24, 2004
Got my head burried in Greg Bear's Dead Lines.As a rule he's sci-fi writer, but this appears to be an attempt at horror, or at least a chiller. He's done that once before with Psychlone, which to be honest I didn't rate at all, so I don't have especially high hopes for this.
Pity really, coz as far as hard sci-fi's concerned, he's the best there is.
Speaking of fave authors, it's about time Iain M Banks brought out something new. He seems to do two books a year, one sci-fi one straight fiction. Dead Air was a corker, so hopefully his next sci-fi effort will be up to a similar standard.
Additional...
Ok, so I'm a 3rd of the way through the book now, and it's really not that bad. Not ground breaking, makes some obscure use of the Bell Theorum in quantum physics, which is certainly unusual for a chiller.
Not scary, not mind boggling, not something that makes you go "Wow! That's clever"... but certainly interesting.
Labels: books
Steve 2:11 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, March 19, 2004
So hmmm.It's been a while.
Not much going on... not that I wanna speak about here anyway.
Probably gonna be getting a new pc in a couple of weeks, which should be fun. I just have to figure out how to get it home, as they usually come in huge boxes and I don't drive. Guess I'll just grab a taxi if I can't scrounge a ride.
Other than that... it's all life as usual, mostly staring blankly at my laptop screen.
Saying that, I've got my head burried in a book at the mo (ok, not at this exact second). Darwin's Children by Greg Bear. Hard sci-fi... the best kind.
Labels: books
Steve 11:56 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, September 04, 2003
I just finished reading Dead Air by Iain Banks. Brilliant book, though I'd expect no less form the best british writer out there at the mo. Two days to read a novel... that's something of a record for me, as I'm not a fast reader by any stretch of the imagination, I just couldn't put it down.Comments are still down, and likely to remain down untill the 8th at the very earliest. Oddly, I'm finding it rather liberating, blogging without comments. It's rather like going back to the very start, when I had no readers whatsoever, didn't care what anyone stumbling across my ramblings thought, and knowing that even if anyone did read it, they couldn't respond other than via email.
So, I won't be going in search of a new comments system. If yaccs gets it's act together and starts functioning again, all well and good, but if it doesn't, I don't care. I'll remain commentless and maybe get back to the purity of what blogging once was for me.
I think in truth I've become entirely jaded with blogging as a phenomenon.... the blogging scene. I used to read twenty or so blogs daily, even twice daily... clicking through them excpectantly to see what was going on in this odd little corner of unreality. I felt some kind of attachment to the people I read. These days... well, I still like these people, in as much as it's possible to know anyone from reading a few choice lines every day or so.... but for the most part, I just don't care that much any more.
Hmm... multiple deletes.... too much stuff that sounds negative, when really it's just a whole load of indifference. Time to sit back and take stock, decide what's important and what's not. This blog will continue, and perhaps be better for my not actually caring too much any more about how it's percieved. Self promotion after a time becomes just another chore. Lots of websites, high online profile... what a pain in the arse.
Steve 11:05 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
Still reading Vitals by Greg Bear. Chilling... very very chilling. If you have any interest in consparacy theories, I highly recommend this book. I wouldn't say I put too much weight behind such things myself, but with a healthy dose of ingrained paranoia, I'm finding it quite gripping.Started listening to a compilation of Gary Numan albums on mp3 cd sent to me by a friend some time back. His earlier works are deffinately superior to his more recent output. He seemed to lose the plot somewhat after working with Bill Sharpe and embracing midi over analogue synths. Thoroughly enjoying hearing Dance and I Assasin again.
I find it amusing that Numan's most recent album totally rips off Nine Inch Nails, when in the beginning, NIN was pretty much copying Numan. Having said that, they're both derivative of Bowie's earlier works. Neither would exist were it not for Low, but then you could say that of a lot of bands.
There's something about sitting here with my head burried in a good book, listening to old music... it gets the creative juices flowing. Nothing specific as such, but I feel the rumblings of something in there. I guess it's good brain execise, kickstarts the lower levels of my subconcious. It's hard to say if I'll actually do anything though. The musical urge rather stalled when I got stuck on a tune I was making a month or so back, and I haven't written anything in ages. I need some kind of life to relate to before I can write... human interaction outide of the net, and there's precious little of that in my life at the moment. I do keep dabbling with photoshop though, mostly just tinkering with photographs, or creating striking images from what were originally grainy low res webcam images. It's fun and satisfying, but not really inspired work.
Steve 4:02 PM [+] (0) comments
Monday, July 08, 2002
Ah, sci-fi. How I love it.30 something years ago Gene Roddenberry introduced us to a world of space ships, aliens, phasers, communicators, and funky talking computers. Pretty far fetched stuff to be sure, and I remember as a kid saying to my mum "I want a communicator, and a phaser, and a computer, and and and..." She smiled and said "That's just tv. Those things don't exist." I replied "Computers are real." She smiled again and said "Yes, but they're very expensive, and very big. Ordinary people will never have them." I was somewhat disappointed, to say the least, though nearly 30 odd years later I'm pleased to say she was misinformed. We have the communicators... cell phones being more common than a very common thing. We have the talking computers... well, mine does, and understands my speach too (sometimes). Now where can I get a phaser gun?
Jump forward a few years, mid 80s, William Gibson's Neuromancer. He describes cyber space. We may not have the fully immersed experience just yet, more's the pity, as I'd love to just jack in, but still... you're how many thousand miles away from me? You're reading these words that I only wrote maybe a few mins or hours ago, and you're doing it in the comfort of your own home most likely. If you wanted to, you could click the link to my webcam and watch me midlessly tapping away at my laptop, or even venture into audio/video chat with me on yahoo or netmeeting. I'm not saying you should, or that I'd want to either, but the fact is that the technology is there in your home and mine.
So what's all this got to do with anything?
Two things. The first being that sci-fi is often seen as being nothing more than another brand of fantasy literature. In some cases this is true, but that's not 'real' sci-fi at all. The truly hard edged stuff very often shows us glimpses of what really is to come, and often much sooner than we expect.
The second, well... it's related to the book I picked up today. Vitals by Greg Bear. He's always been one of the very best contemprorary sci-fi writers as far as I'm concerned, dealing with concepts that are wholely plausable, often within our lifetimes. Check out Queen Of Angels, Slant, and Darwin's Radio to see what I mean. Anyway, in Vitals he's describing the work of a scientist researching the possibility of extending human life through radical gene therapy. I won't go into the technical aspects, but suffice to say if he's on the mark with this, as many sci-fi writers have proved to be, I want in. Having an ego the size of a plant, the idea of living for a few thousand years rather appeals to me.
On an entirely different note, I also picked up a copy of Ursula LeGuin's new book The Other Wind. I'm rather thrilled about this, as it's book five in the Earthsea series, something I started reading when I was about 11. As a rule, I'm not into the fantasy genre at all. Wizards, dragons and such don't do it for me, and I couldn't give a monkeys' about LOTR, but there's a certain charm about the Earthsea novels that I find compelling. Maybe it's just nostalgia, reading something that continues from a book I read as a kid... whatever, I look forward to reading it.
Labels: books
Steve 6:45 PM [+] (0) comments
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