Are we getting coachloads of visiting spirits or is it just that everyone's shy?
I am reading religiously but find I have little of value to say. Your reviews are very interesting and making me want to seek out things I haven't read myself.
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bthogg |
#81 | |||
Are we getting coachloads of visiting spirits or is it just that everyone's shy? I am reading religiously but find I have little of value to say. Your reviews are very interesting and making me want to seek out things I haven't read myself. |
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War Arrow |
#82 | |||
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Thanks a lot! But "religiously"?
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War Arrow |
#83 | |||
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And appropriately enough...
I am seldom taken by any hysterical need to cry like a baby upon being informed of noted celebrity deaths, and the whole outpouring of sympathy for Lady Diana "Queen of Hearts" Spencer was a mystery to me (at least until I read about perfect victim archetypes in Patrick Tierney's excellent The Highest Altar), exceptions to this rule being late, great fat rap chap Big Pun, Frankie Howerd, and Carl Sagan. Not sure why exactly - these deaths just touched me I guess. Actually maybe I do have some idea in the case of Carl Sagan. I found his Cosmos TV series greatly inspiring when I was a kid, and more recently his book The Demon-Haunted World kind of changed my life, or at least helped me spring clean my brain of useless woo... The Demon-Haunted World is a fantastic book by the way, quite unlike Dawkin's The God Delusion in case anyone's worried about instances of potentially relentless tub-thumping. I'd recommend it to anyone wondering what their brain is for, and it's as inspiring and uplifting as anything I've read. If you think Atlantis is mysterious, romantic and exciting whilst Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is probably a bit beige and wears too much polyester, then you need to read The Demon-Haunted World as soon as possible. Carl Sagan never minced words in denouncing bad science or superstition, and nor did he ever pander to the oversimplification of complex or difficult ideas; despite which he remained a consistently compelling and affable communicator, able to convey even the thorniest or complex subjects with eloquence and a warmth that makes the Waltons seem like a Norwegian death metal act. It's possible to disagree with claims made in Carl Sagan's writing, but it seems to me that it must be very difficult to dislike him. Contact the novel grew out of a screenplay written by Carl Sagan and life partner Anne Druyan, which eventually became Contact the film (Jodie Foster playing Eleanor Arrowsmith). Neither film nor book is exactly an adaptation of the other, and both tell a near identical story, although the differences are subtle but profound (unless I've read it wrong). In each, a message is picked up from the vicinity of a star some twenty-six light years distant. This message contains the blueprint of a machine which, when built... well, nobody quite knows, though the effect upon human society and both religious and scientific communities are pronounced. Perhaps through its being produced at a time when Christian fundamentalism was really beginning to get into its stride (following great successes with Judas Priest albums played backwards) Contact the film is somewhat more polarised than the novel, with Ellie as a strident atheist who gets noticeably needled by implications of a spiritual dimension to the message from Vega, only to come to a pleasantly ambiguous awakening of sorts at the tale's conclusion. At times the film seems to represent a conflict between religion and science (note the Hellfire preacher who sabotages the project). The novel however is less about conflict and more about an attempt to seek common ground - the maddeningly simple idea of science and religion being different expressions of the same impulse, with Ellie as agnostic and the theological voice granted the benefit of equal terms with a more elegant and sophisticated argument than was allowed on screen. As a message, it could have gone horribly wrong (see Stephen Jay Gould's uncharacteristically shite Rock of Ages) but works so well in Carl Sagan's hands that it's kind of difficult to imagine any way of putting it better - possibly why this is a novel rather than a treatise, some arguments just carry more weight as thought experiment than as bloodless discussion. As a novel, Contact is an oddity, and definitely the work of a scientist rather than a novelist, although this should be taken as observation rather than criticism. As I realise I should have expected, Sagan leaves nothing to shorthand. Mathematical, astrophysical, and theological debates are afforded no less detail than they would be in any work of non-fiction, whether as simple narrative or voiced during extraordinarily in-depth conversations between characters as they argue over the nature of God, the universe, and anything else that would be a bit of a headache if written by a lesser talent. In terms of infodumping, Contact offers neither apology nor compromise in its efforts to edumacate the reader, and oddly (considering how closely it resembles its big screen incarnation) bears comparison with novels written before the advent of film and television (I'm talking big fat Thomas Hardy jobs here). The narrative concerns itself primarily with events and ideas over conventional he said-she said sequential structure, and the first fifty pages detail Ellie's life as a bone dry catalogue of significant happenings leading up to her work with radio telescopes. In fact, the entire novel is somewhat dry in terms of the nuts and bolts. The inspirational element is the cumulative sum of these debates and descriptions and dissections. It shouldn't work, but it does, and it excels, and may even be capable of changing the way you think. Not quite like anything else I've read.
Last Edited By: War Arrow 10 November, 2008 7:52 PM.
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War Arrow |
#84 | |||
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Michael Chabon The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Harper Perennial, 2007)
Psst... wanna see some rocks?
Last Edited By: War Arrow 18 February, 2009 10:42 PM.
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War Arrow |
#85 | |||
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Clifford D. Simak The Visitors (Del Rey, 1980) Part of a major haul of gems from a second hand book place in Cornwall contained an issue of Analog circa 1980 which featured part two of this story, and as I knew I'd be frustrated reading just the middle I Amazoned up this complete version. Which didn't take much umming and ahing given the author, Clifford D. Simak being someone whose works I can see myself getting obsessively collectory about at some point. The Visitors seems to have been produced in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and there's parallels here, but having made the connection I realise that it would be equally easy to view a lot of that film as borrowing from Simak territory, particularly the setting and the folky characters hanging about on turnpikes in search of saucers. Here we have rural America as the visitors arrive. The visitors resemble the 2001 monolith, huge black slabs of matter the size of city blocks, and they float soundless to earth, land in fields, follow planes, circle cities, just generally float around following their own unknowable agenda and all in continued silence until they become so ubiquitous as to be regarded as much nuisance as mystery. I'll avoid giving the rest of it away, but the cover promises an invasion story like no other, and sure enough it is an invasion story like no other. Each time you think you've got it figured out (having been primed by every other invasion story ever told) the narrative flies off at an angle which you could never expect and yet makes absolute sense. The visitors turn out to be not quite what you would expect, and even more refreshing, the American government acts in a way entirely unlike how it ends up acting in all those other Independence Day variations. Simak reminds me more and more of John Steinbeck, with that same warm glow of a rural sunset feel that delivers the goods without tipping over into schmaltz. Although his use of urban or metropolitan settings is less convincing here than is his more familiar territory (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and so on), The Visitors holds together well as an unusually complex tale told in deceptively simple terms. In keeping with Simak's low-key ecological message, early murmurings set up an idea of humanity relating to the visitors just as native Americans related (for better or worse, and mostly worse) to the first white settlers, but the idea fades to background noise as the narrative walks a fine line between uncertainty and fear of the unknown, and a view of the visitors as a positive force for change. Without a single dramatic incident, the book ends upon a sudden shift of emphasis that brings the native Americans / white settlers parallels back into sharp, deeply ominous relief - and by means you never see coming until they're on top of you. A fantastic and genuinely original novel with twists that are absolutely unexpected, and a theme that really needs to be read rather than simplified in a review. I'm beginning to regard this guy as an almost criminally underrated author. EDIT: Having just discovered how to paste images in here (and sometimes they even show up when I come back to the site for a second look - thanks YUKU, you're really graet!)... I'm going back and adding book covers from page 1 onwards because I'm a nerd.... just in case anyone wants to go back and have a look. If there's gaps that's because I can't find the cover of the edition I read (or at least not within the first ten google images pages) - Hothouse being one I couldn't find, for example. Psst... wanna see some rocks?
Last Edited By: War Arrow 17 February, 2009 4:36 PM.
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War Arrow |
#86 | |||
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH!!!! And I'm back. It's been a weird fucking journey this last three months. I extricated myself from a relationship that
was killing me, and I don't just mean it really sucked, I mean it was killing me: sapping my will to live. At one point I cancelled some leave on the
grounds that I would rather have been at work than at home. Then I moved out having found myself a half-decent flat (against all odds). Split up with the SO
twice because somehow she read the first time as the initiation of a hiatus. Had my bike stolen. Found it again. Had a good, good friend snuff it. And fell
head over heels in love with a sweetie from Texas. Overwrought touchy-feely details in blog form here if
anyone's fussed.
Oh by the way - I've discovered the joys of Flickr, so I've scanned a load of covers in and added them to the reviews here in instances where I couldn't otherwise find a jpeg or the one I found was a bit crap. If nothing else, please, please, please do yourself a favour and take a look at the cover of Simak's City because it is absolutely beautiful.
Poul Anderson Genesis (Tor Books, 2000)
More of my usual bullshit available at these locations:
Last Edited By: War Arrow 17 February, 2009 8:56 PM.
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War Arrow |
#87 | |||
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More of my usual bullshit available at these locations: |
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War Arrow |
#88 | |||
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"He wondered how much tedious ceremony and baroque speechifying they would have to sit through before anything of note happened or was said."
More of my usual bullshit available at these locations: |
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Curufea |
#89 | |||
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Not his best work. Not a patch on his Culture books. I didn't manage to finish it, but may go back to it one day.
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War Arrow |
#90 | |||
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Someone just told me that Excession and Use of Weapons are the ones to go for. Those are part of the Culture series right?
More of my usual bullshit available at these locations: |
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felice |
#91 | |||
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I haven't read Excession yet, but yes, Use of Weapons is Culture and very good. I'd also highly recommend Player of Games,
which is a lot shorter so good for dipping your toes in the Culture setting.
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War Arrow |
#92 | |||
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Short is good so maybe Player of Games is the one, and speaking of space opera...
One day Crane suggested to Seaton that they should take notes, in addition to the photographs they had been taking. 'I know comparatively little of astronomy, but, with the instruments we have, we should be able to get data, especially on planetary systems, which would be of interest to astronomers, Miss Spencer, being a secretary, could help us?'
More of my usual bullshit available at these locations: |
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felice |
#93 | |||
War Arrow wrote:"You wanted to know who'd fight for the rebel Houses? Who'd bear arms against the engineers of history? You would." 8) |
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doloras |
#94 | |||
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[The name "War Arrow" was not found in this timeline.]
The Stacks - the site for
Faction Paradox fanfic and other fanworks
"Larry was with us in spirit" - Kate Orman
(for more of my messed up thoughts on culture, magick and revolutionary politics) |
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War Arrow |
#95 | |||
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Isaac Asimov The Gods Themselves (1972) I've got a feeling I may have picked this up on the recommendation of someone here, a few pages back. Anyway, it was a good recommendation, although it's hard to know what to quite say about this one. It's divided into three parts, and given that the first sixty or so pages pretty much consists of conversations about electrons it says a lot about this guy's literary skills that it keeps you not only reading but fascinated, even gripped. Next we spin off into an alternate universe where the laws of physics are subtly different (and the weak nuclear force much stronger) inhabited by a species of creature with three sexes which meet as a triad to reproduce, this meeting being a strange sort of blending affair like gases mixing. It's impressive that he's made this part credible given the utterly alien nature of the species and their entire universe, although it's maybe a little surprising that he didn't take it even further beyond the few anthropomorphisms - the female as the Emotional of the group (together with left-male and right-male being Parental and Rational)... although maybe that's the point. Given the bloody awful (and indeed, "fucking shit" some might say) Susan Calvin stories I've found it hard to avoid wondering about Asimov's attitude to sex in general (as in gender and roles - sorry, I am not obsessed!) and it feels like some of The God's Themselves might represent his loosening up and thrashing out a few ideas. Beyond the alien characters questioning their roles (the Emotional who behaves more like a Rational) I wouldn't like to make too much of a guess at what he's saying here, or even if he's saying anything specific.... but it's a damn sight more interesting than Susan Calvin. To further elaborate on the theme, the last part seems to be a low-key love story set on the moon - and all of this spun around the electron pump, a device which connects the two universes, represents a supply of free power but at a terrible cost, as the saying goes. Well, a damn fine novel. If anyone here has a better idea what it's actually about (I only picked up a very vague impression - and my ideas about that seemed to change every thirty pages or so) then I'd be interested to hear it. [url=http://thinkingaloudforum.com/forum/index.php][img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3582/3337781217_565d3b396a_m.jpg[/img][/url] |
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doloras |
#96 | |||
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Ah yes, that would be my recommendation. The mid-section of this novel stands out massively in the Asimov oeuvre as the only time he's actually ever
written aliens, as opposed to humans, humanoids (like in Nightfall) and robots.
The Stacks - the site for
Faction Paradox fanfic and other fanworks
"Larry was with us in spirit" - Kate Orman
(for more of my messed up thoughts on culture, magick and revolutionary politics) |
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War Arrow |
#97 | |||
doloras wrote:Ah - knew it was either you or Felice (so thanks for the tip off). Quite surprised that these are his token aliens. Shame in some ways as they're quite well realised as entirely non-human and not even vaguely resembling antything we'd recognise creatures - if anything I thought he could have gone a bit further and dispensed with the few anthropomorphisms he did throw in (terming the male Rational and female Emotional just seemed a bit too lazy in some ways). I have Foundation also (the first one) though I'm probably going to read something else first. [url=http://thinkingaloudforum.com/forum/index.php][img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3582/3337781217_565d3b396a_m.jpg[/img][/url] |
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War Arrow |
#98 | |||
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Gateway to Tomorrow edited by John Carnell (1954) Probably said this before but I find these sort of anthologies fascinating as snapshots of the history of science-fiction writing, aside from often wonderful covers, there's also the draw of those names presumably regarded as promising at the time for whatever reason, yet which have otherwise vanished into obscurity ranking not even so much as a 2009 Google hit let alone a Wikipedia stub. History tends to have a better memory for earlier versions of its own present shape, so weirder historical dead ends and offshoots often get forgotten - and collections such as this would seem to be the place to look for them. Well, there's nothing absolutely earth shattering here although it's nevertheless a curious snapshot of English (excepting one Australian author who might as well be English) science-fiction writing at the end of the 1940s. There's a few surprises (well... mention of hyperspace and an incongruously Baxteresque reference to water ice as reaction mass in space travel) and a smattering of entirely readable shorts - not least of these being John Wyndham's exceptional Dumb Martian (which I read elsewhere quite recently but it was well-worth reading again) - but for some reason I'm left with the impression that the late 1940s view of space travel is that it would be pretty much like being in the navy but without water... or the cop, or the construction worker, or the red indian dude... This tendency is most notable in the least imaginative stories here which feature spacecraft with speaking tubes and admirals played by Trevor Howard - well, maybe not terrible, though it's hard to say as I couldn't summon up the interest to work out what was happening. Given that many of these were written so close to the end of World War II with naval service no doubt still fresh in the minds of some of these authors, it's understandable and seems the comparable to present day space opera which (in my experience) just seems to draw on Star Wars and the like for no reason other than to get a load of explosions together in the same place. Anyway... that's more of an observation than a quibble. The bland stuff is over and done with so quickly that you barely even notice (and interestingly
enough the big name here is Arthur C. Clarke whose contribution is actually a bit pants) whilst the nuggets (though excepting Dumb Martian that may be
overstating it a little) from E. C. Tubb, John Christopher, George Longdon and others were a joy to read.
[url=http://thinkingaloudforum.com/forum/index.php][img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3582/3337781217_565d3b396a_m.jpg[/img][/url]
Last Edited By: War Arrow 17 March, 2009 4:16 PM.
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War Arrow |
#99 | |||
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The more I read by Brian Aldiss the more I'm convinced that he's almost an entire genre of his own - something beyond just your regular literature, and the science-fiction tag seems maybe too narrow (although that's more to do with what others have written than anything). It's not exactly that he's light years ahead of everyone else in terms of imagination, but there's a certain quality to his writing (as I'm only just beginning to notice) that really stands out. In fact, I could imagine that of all the folks I've read in this thread, Aldiss is the one who could turn out a really top quality Faction novel. Earthworks is set a few hundred years in the future with Earth in the middle of an ecological and economic disaster. There's no global warming predictions here (and I'm not sure if that idea had really taken hold back in 1965 when this was written) but overpopulation has lead to mass starvation, harsh authoritarian law in decrepit cities, and a return to pseudo-medieval existence with indentured slave labour struggling to grow crops in exhausted and heavily polluted soil. So there's none of the Faction tropes here that might make sense of my 'top quality Faction novel' claim, but for sheer atmosphere it seems not a million miles away in places, and although I know I've got this the wrong way round there's passages here that just made me think 'Daniel O'Mahoney'. Plus I suppose if I really wanted to stretch the point it might not be too difficult to compare Frankenstein Unbound and Erasing Sherlock. A weird book, very short but very rich in texture and absolutely devoid of formula (the blurb on the back promises that "there is one solution - a solution so frightful that no one is willing to adopt it" - and this in reference to a development which happens within the last four pages). [url=http://thinkingaloudforum.com/forum/index.php][img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3582/3337781217_565d3b396a_m.jpg[/img][/url] |
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War Arrow |
#100 | |||
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Future Earths: Under South American Skies (Daw Books, 1993)
[url=http://thinkingaloudforum.com/forum/index.php][img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3582/3337781217_565d3b396a_m.jpg[/img][/url] |
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