Books.

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Re: Books.

Post by TellusEidolon »

According to wikipedia; 'as realistic as possible and based on existing technology'.
Artificial does not mean obtuse! ~Uno from Paperinik's New Adventures.
It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it become rigid and stale. ~Iroh
You can't make an omelette without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others. ~Tarquin
The skin stretched and tanned, the striped suit sown into the flesh itself, the killer donned a new body, giggling to no one, "Wears Waldo."
This is here for future reference.

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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

@yira: Yay for other people actually reading books and reporting on them!!! :ymparty:

Concerning your questions... I actually have NOT read the book yet (I'd have reported on it here for sure if I had), but I saw the movie. Book and movie are supposed to be quite similar, though I guess the book has time to go into a lot more details. The one truly unrealistic thing is the dust storm right in the beginning which sets up the plot. Not so much its existence (Mars often has huge dust storms that sometimes cover the entire planet) but that it would not be able to blow people and gear away like that. Atmospheric pressure on Mars is like 1% of that on Earth, even a very powerful storm would feel like a mild breeze unless you happen to be a mote of dust.

Now, one of these days, I need to catch up with writing about the most recent books I've read again... But for now, I'll refrain myself and only talk about that thing I should not be doing, namely buying books! :P

So, over a month ago, my birthday. It was pretty crappy. One of the nice things which happened was that a certain former girlfriend of mine took the time to send me birthday wishes and chat with me! :x And I told her how my day was not going so well. Several hours later, I get an e-mail from Amazon informing me she had sent me a 30 Euro gift card!!! :-o :D \:d/ :ymhug: :ymhug: :ymhug: I asked what I should spend it on and she said either DVDs or books, so we could have something to talk about. I went for books! B-)

I tried to get - of course - stuff I really wanted, combined with good price and high page count. I ended up with five books for 31 Euros, totaling 4100 pages!! These were:

Peter F. Hamilton - The Void Trilogy: a looong time ago, I had reported buying Judas Unchained, the second volume of the Commonwealth Saga (I had already gotten Pandora's Star way back in the US in 2006). Hamilton wrote a trilogy taking place in the same universe, but more than a millenium later: The Dreaming/Temporal/Evolutionary Void. And I found this entire trilogy in a box set for just 15.50!!! :-o
Peter F. Hamilton - Great North Road: Similar to Fallen Dragon, a thick standalone novel.
Neal Stephenson - Anathem: I read the utterly fantastic Cryptonomicon back in 2008, and of course I've heard tons of good things about Stephenson, so time to get some more - this one is also a standalone which clocks in at 1000 pages!

I've read two of these books by now, but more on that later.

Weeks later, I met up with a good friend here in town to watch the final season of True Blood, and there was a gift for me! :) I had been a bit worried when she had forbidden me to make any wishes and told me she already had an idea. I really should trust her more... It was Randall Munroe - What If?!! Actually weird that I did not have it yet...

In the following weeks, I received a 10 Euro voucher from Amazon. It stated "No books", but I thought it maybe referred only to German books, where the price is fixed. But noooo, after an hour of searching for stuff, I was told it did not work! :( Later on, I used it for the fifth season of Game of Thrones, Sucker Punch (Blu-Ray Extended) and something my mom wanted. But before that...

... I went ahead and ordered ALL of the books I had put in my shopping cart, though I ordered them used from Amazon Marketplace. That means €3 S&H each time, like with all the Michael Moorcock books I ordered back in January. And in this case, with a single exception, none of the books cost 1 Cent. :P Still, they were all a lot cheaper than getting them directly from Amazon, in the end, it was 13 books for 55 Euros.

Stephen King: Just After Sunset (short stories, arrived already), The Wind Through The Keyhole (Book "4.5" in the Dark Tower series, and, no, I won't reread all other seven again...), Blaze (seems to be the first "Bachman" book, predating even Carrie). Excepting the very new Short Story collection Bazaar of Bad Dreams (not even out as a paperback) and the upcoming third Bill Hodges book, as well as the limited edition novella Blockade Billy... These three I bought bring me pretty much up-to-date concerning my favorite author.

Peter F. Hamilton: Misspent Youth (prequel to the Commonwealth Saga, I got this one as a hardcover, much cheaper than the paperback!), and The Web: Lightstorm. The latter seems to be part of a series of short (it's 130 pages long) books for young adults (or maybe even older children), and, well, this is the one written by Hamilton. This was the book which cost 1 cent, which was really weird since the next "cheapest" one was SEVENTEEN Euros.

Neal Stephenson: Reamde (standalone cyberpunk, and, no, the title is written correctly, this book has arrived already and is like 1050 pages long...), Quicksilver - the Baroque Cycle 1 (also arrived, nearly 950 pages and small print...), The Confusion - the Baroque Cycle 2, The System of the World - the Baroque Cycle 3 (both of these also about 800 - 900 pages each).

William Gibson: Spook Country (Blue Ant Trilogy 2), Zero History (Blue Ant Trilogy 3). I had already gotten Pattern Recognition way back in the US in 2006, now I have the trilogy complete. There's only a single Gibson book I do not have now, his newest.

Michael Moorcock: Mother London (also arrived already) and King of the City: Yes, there are still MM books I do not have yet, these two, written around the turn of the century, form a loose duology dealing with Moorcock's home city. Perhaps not quite my style, but they are supposed to be excellent.

A few days later, I ordered the Blu-Rays/DVDs - and Amazon pointed me to Peter F. Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse, which was on sale for just €5.3. I had overlooked this beforehand, it is a short story collection partially dealing with the Commonwealth Saga and otherwise having standalone tales. Once this has arrived, I'll have a total of seven Hamilton books I can read in sequence...

And finally, two days ago (when the first package with four books arrived) I went to a concert with my other good friend here. He drove to another part of town to pick up someone, and I got out beforehand to go to an ATM. When the car came back, there was a wrapped present on the front seat. I joked: "Oh, a present for me!" but put it aside. Considering he had just had his birthday a few weeks ago, I thought the girl he had gone to pick up had given it to him. But it turned out I was right, it was his present to me!!! :D Another book... This time something quite special: Dietmar Dath - Leider bin ich tot ("Alas, I am dead" or "I'm sorry but I'm dead"). Pretty sure none of you has ever heard of Dath, who seems to be unknown outside of Germany, and, well, I myself had not realized he had written a bunch of books (this one is his newest which just appeared in January). I myself know - and highly appreciate - the guy for his fantastic movie and music reviews in the newspaper I read; he's a big heavy metal fan (his tribute to Lemmy was stellar) and also is totally into fantasy and SF, probably one of the few authors I'd really like to meet and have a chat with. So, noooo idea if I'll like this book, and it will be weird to read something in German. I'll report. Sometime in the far future. Considering my nearly read-through "immediate column" of my bookshelf is growing rapidly again (not to mention the ton of unread Michael Moorcock books), I likely will not get around to reading it until 2017...

EDIT: So, most of my books have arrived! Two orders are still missing. One contains Stephen King's Blaze and William Gibson's Spook County, this one is coming from the US (today, I received two others from the US), so I'm not worried yet. Will very likely arrive next week. The other one is Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, and this one comes from the UK and should have arrived like over a week ago... :-s Well, that was the week I was at home. But I got no notice in the mail that it had arrived and could be picked up or something like that... I fear it lost. :((
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

Okay, time for another info dump that everyone will ignore! :P
Don Alexander wrote:Ooookay. That's it, folks! For now! :P The next book, already hinted at above, still remains mostly unread.
Said book was Michael Moorcock's Pawn Of Chaos (Tales Of The Eternal Champion). This is the second collection of original short stories, including one new Moorcock tale, and other stories not just about Elric, but also other incarnations of the Eternal Champion, by other authors. And... Wow, I've forgotten almost everything about this book. :P Hopefully, paging around in it will refresh my memories a bit.

Michael Moorcock - Sir Milk and Blood: This one I skipped, as I knew it already. It was published here first but then republished in EC14.
Matthew J. Jorgensen - The Enquiry: This was a rather weird Elric tale. multiverse.org wants to place it in The Bane of the Black Sword, but the story starts with a full-scale naval assault by Jagreen Lern on the Purple Towns, which would place it somewhere in Stormbringer. :-\ Anyway, I read this in a rather fragmentary way over the space of several weeks, so not much stuck. Elric and Moonglum later meet Jhary O'Conel, who as always has knowledge of all his incarnations, which leads to some very funny interactions with Moonglum.
C. Dean Andersson - The War Skull of Hel: This was a pretty cool story, featuring Urlik Skarsol from Phoenix in Obsidian. He meets several women warriors who turn out to be (in part) werewolves, and who seem to be the heroines of a bunch of other books by this author. Here, they are significantly older and in semi-retirement. Urlik has landed on this world, called, as it turns out, by Hel, who wants his Black Sword. It turns out to be too powerful for her.
Colin Greenland - Fiery Spirits: Dorian Hawkmoon and Yisselda travel to Venezia in search of the great flamingos of Camargue. They find them, as well as a lot of politics and intrigue.
John Shirley - In the Cornelius Arms: A somewhat erotic Jerry Cornelius tale dealing with magic and microchips.
Nancy A. Collins - Sign of the Silver Hand: A certain Harald Bekk travels deep into the Andes to find El Dorado. Only to find he is connected to Corum, who once came to Earth and was venerated here as a god. This was a really good story.
Richard Lee Byers - Acorns: A young Dorian Hawkmoon, not even Duke of Köln yet, gets sent on a transdimensional mission - to kill none other than Urlik Skarsol!!
Mike Lee - Dragging the Line: A young couple traveling in India meets a peculiar tour guide: Karl Glogauer. Even now, having read the Glogauer books, I can't really place this guy... It seems to take place a long time after Moorcock's Glogauer tales (see below), and the man unnerves the couple be telling all kinds of tales from ancient history as if he had actually lived through them - which, I guess, he has...
Alexandra Elizabeth Honigsberg - Awakening - A Symphony: Poem.
Roland Green and Frieda Murray - To Speak With Men and Angels: Yet another von Bek, during the First World War, interviews a strange prisoner of war who turns out to be a demon serving Lucifer. He has a mission for von Bek - Do thou the Devil's work! They get out of the prison and travel in France into a mine to prevent a portal to Hell itself being opened.
Caitlin R. Kiernan - Giants in the Earth: A tale of the Dancers at the End of Time. A young Jherek Carnelian meets a strange girl time traveler.
David Ferring - The Festive Season: A story set in something of a medieval world (EDIT: Seems to be the Warhammer universe!) featuring some fur merchants coming to a city. There's a cameo by an old, mad albino who indeed seems to be an alternate-universe Elric. Also had a cool sequence of one of the protagonists being attacked by animated toy soldiers - a plot I have used in one of my self-written RPGs! :D
Peter Crowther - Halfway House: Glogauer again. This one is very similar to the Moorcock works, playing within Glogauer's mind. This time around, he's an astronaut drifting in space after his ship was destroyed by a meteoroid strike. Lots of flashbacks and memories.
Gary Gygax - Evening Odds: Yeah, Gygax!! One of the best stories of the book. Protagonist is a certain Simon, who indeed turns out to be Simon of Byzantium from The Greater Conqueror! And... he has become an immortal, for this story takes place in 20th century America!! It contained a lot of references to the Game of Time which I'm still kind of unable to get... Together with some other immortal multiverse travelers and a biker gang, Simon storms a warehouse where a Lord of Hell is being invoked.
Bill Crider - The Captive Soul: Elric and Moonglum accompany a man named Metrian Doon to the tower of a sorcerer, where Doon's soul is being imprisoned. Lesson: If you want your soul back, don't hire the guy with the soul-drinking sword. #-o
James S. Dorr - Trail-Ways: Another poem.
Thomas E. Fuller - In the Machinery of Dreams: A direct continuation of The Soul of an Old Machine from Tales of the White Wolf. Elric and Moonglum travel forth, only to shortly thereafter meet a furry... um, a cat girl (in MTG terms, a Leonin) who is accompanied by two Griffins, who have come from another world to combat Mercurios of the Cold Laughter.
Don Webb - Even the Night: Jerry Cornelius, whose dead body was handed from Goth club to Goth club, is resurrected to lead a revolution. Weird...
Robert E. Vardeman - Isle of Lost Souls: Erlric manages to get Stormbringer stolen from him by a woman who lures him to the island of the title - a limbo from which, allegedly, no one comes back.
Brian Herbert and Marie Landis - Raiders from the Ghost World: A science fiction tale. Ghost children from the ghost world are stealing household appliances in the name of Chaos.
Brad Linaweaver - The Last Short Story Writer at the End of Time: Jerry Cornelius has made it to the End of Time, where he writes for a newspaper. Then he meets the Eternal Champion, and they land in Berchtesgarden and Adolf Hitler's Berghof... Seriously crazy and in the tradition of the first Dancer books. Linaweaver also wrote the fantastic The Littlest Stormtrooper in the Elric collection. He really likes to spoof the Nazis...
James Lovegrove - Angel of War: Another Oswald Bastable story set in an alternate universe where Lennon is running against McCartney as mayor of Liverpool!!! The protagonist - an incarnation of the author - is a speech writer working for Lennon. He goes to a pub, The Ancient Mariner - the barkeep is named Korzeniowski :)) - where he meets a strange man named Bastable. Who asks him about Michael Moorcock (no idea) and Una Persson (ah, the famous actress!). And tells him a bit of his history - and that he does not really have an idea why he has landed in this timeline, but it usually means that a terrible world war is imminent. This was a great story, and Lovegrove co-authored the great The Trembler on the Axis in the other volume. Seems there are some authors here (see also Linaweaver, and, of course, Gygax) who consistently write good stories. :)
Dafydd ab Hugh - Editor: A very peculiar ending. The secretary of defense is going mad and travels up to his space station to wipe out the Earth but commits suicide instead.

All in all, I liked this book less than the Elric one, mostly because some stories were just weird and rather disassociated from what I knew.
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

I finished up Pawn of Chaos after nearly five weeks, in the second half of February, after I had traveled home to visit my mom and take her to the airport. There I also received the gift-certificate books from Amazon mentioned above. But before launching into those, I read one more shorter book I had with me:

Michael Moorcock - Sojan, the Swordsman/Joe R. Lansdale - Under the Warrior Star: This is a double volume in the series "Planet Stories" by Paizo Publishing, who are creating re-releases of old Sword & Planet classics and also publishing some new stuff.

Before there was Elric, even before there was The Golden Barge, there was Sojan. Moorcock wrote these tales when he was still a teenager, and yes, one notices it. While there are certain similarities to Conan, there's also a lot of Burrows influence (who would have thought? :P ). The stories consist of short chapters, often no more than two pages long. Several of these chapters each form a closed tale, and there are in total four of them. I was rather amused when a typical Sword & Planet cliche was totally averted in the first tale, where Sojan, acting as a mercenary for a (good) king, accompanies a princess of a neighboring realm back to her home. They get attacked by air pirates, and of course, in the end, Sojan gets her home - and there is no sign of romance! :)) The best story was also the longest chapter, Sojan and a group of other mercenaries storm a temple where dark priests have imprisoned spectral creatures - who turn out to be the original inhabitants of this planet, who have long since evolved beyond material bodies. It turns out that Sojan actually takes place in a possible future of our real world, and this is not some fantasy world, but an exoplanet that was settled long before by humans from Earth who had arrived in Generation Arcs - by the time they arrived, they had technologically devolved back into antiquity. That was a pretty cool idea, I thought. :) In total, the stories were, of course, not very good, but also not a horrible read.

The other story is much more refined, and actually new and published here for the first time. There's an amusing foreword by the owner of Paizo, where he laments how much he had to beg Lansdale for a new story, originally the author had just told him: "You can't afford me." :)) This story is rife with cliches, fully on purpose. It starts out with the protagonist learning swordplay from an old master in his youth - a man who can actually perform telekinesis and other crazy mind shit! Then the protagonist ruins his life, goes to Alaska, gets into a plane crash, is scooped up by a top secret government project and sent to a "world in a bottle", a pocket universe these scientists have created. This world has somewhat different physics from our universe, and the lush planet (which exists in a peculiar star system seemingly consisting of a blue dwarf and a red giant - the Warrior Star) is covered by absolutely titanic trees which are many miles (!!!) high and span similar distances. The entire plot takes place in one such tree. The protagonist meets another man, a man of the jungle, who is trying to save some of his comrades from slavers, which include weird aliens riding titanic mantisses. In the end, they just manage to save a single woman - who, yet another cliche, is absolutely stunningly beautiful. Our hero sees how much she means to the other man, and just assumes they are lovers. But it turns out she's just the sister, and soon, she falls for the man from another universe. Yadda, yadda. :P Anyway, these slavers are controlled by a massive and ultra-potent mind-controlling monstrosity. Our hero, in this world of new physical rules, manages to unlock his own telekinetic and telepathic powers, and he leads the people of this tree into a final climatic battle. All in all, it pressed pretty much every expected button, but it was well-written and a lot of fun.

Randall Munroe - What If?: I had already started with another book before I got this as a present - but I had to interrupt my reading for this. I had come home from my friend after midnight, I started reading this... and I was utterly unable to stop, and finished it like six hours later!!! :)) Man, this book is awesome!!

So, for anyone who has no idea what this is: Randall Munroe is the creator of the Nerd Comic Supreme, xkcd! And some years back, he made a new page, where people could ask him crazy questions, and he would attempt to answer them with real science. The first one was "relativistic baseball", which asked what would happen if in a baseball game, the ball would suddenly travel with almost the speed of light (answer: a thermonuclear fireball wipes out the entire city). This book combines a bunch of What Ifs from this webpage with exclusives only in the book. The whole thing is full to the brim with Munroe's fantastic humor and stick figure cartoons. The best things are the REALLY weird questions which Randall did not answer (like "How much blood is contained in the human body and how do I extract it as rapidly as possibly?") At the same time, it is extremely interesting, and I totally recommend it to anyone who has even a bit of interest in the natural sciences! ^:)^
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

Still at home, right after finishing Sojan/Warrior Star, I embarked upon the first of my gifted books: Peter F. Hamilton - Great North Road!

This is a tome of nearly 1000 pages, and, as mentioned, a standalone novel, similar to Fallen Dragon. Now, I love the classics, Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, Niven, etc. But I'm starting to get the feeling Hamilton is turning into my absolute favorite SF author!!! His Greg Mandel trilogy was fun but not that special, but the Night's Dawn trilogy was mind-blowing, as was Fallen Dragon - and now, here, another absolutely mind-blowing book, the best since A Memory of Light a year earlier!!!! :x :x :x

The book takes place in 2143 - for the most part. Two huge technological breakthroughs have taken place which carry the plot:
The Norths: Early this century, Kane North, a very rich man from Great Britain, loses his legs, and his balls, for God and the Queen, in either Iraq or Afghanistan (a weird inconsistency in an almost flawless book, the timeline says "Iraqi" [even missing the word "war"], whereas the main text mentions Afghanistan somewhere), to an IED. He then decides to invest his money into a scientific project of cloning himself. After some false starts, in 2012, Augustine, Bartram and Constantine North are born - and these three patriarchs are still alive when this novel takes place - or would be. Bartram North was gruesomely murdered two decades earlier.
In some magic warping of genetics, a North siring offspring just produces another North. The second generation, the direct offspring of ABC - and there are hundreds of them - are almost perfect creations, highly intelligent and ambitious. Their children already feature some small genetic defects, and are usually of lower intelligence but still on the level of your generic unmodified human. Fourth generation are already unwanted and dumb, and they should not breed. Fifth generation is sterile and seriously mentally deficient. (Reminded me a lot of Cain, the Antediluvians, and the Time of Thin Blood in Vampire: the Masquerade...) Still, there are hundreds of 2nd generation Norths, and they, mostly under the leadership of Constantine, control a massive multi-planet corporate empire.
Gateways: FTL travel is not possible, but huge Stargates are! The theory is developed in 2027, and a decade later, trans-spatial connection have been established across the Solar System. The really awesome thing about Gates is that (in contrast to the ones in Orion's Arm) they can be "shot" toward a target. You do not need a sublight starship to carry a gate to another star system, you just open a gate somewhere in this system. The mouth is unstable and jumps around, but you can just dump your components there, then assemble a fixed gate which is stable. This way, habitable planets are quickly colonized. One of these is a super-Earth (it seems to be a rather low-density planet, as no real mention is made of an increased surface gravity) named St. Libra in the Sirius system. A gigantic, mostly tropical planet with a ring system (which creates an uninhabitable zone around the equator with perpetual meteor fall). Here, genetically modified algaes in gigantic wetfarms produce copious amounts of bioil - indeed, mankind still runs mostly on "fossil" fuels, except these are now renewable. St. Libra is essentially the property of the North's corporation, Northumberland Interstellar. Here is where Bartram resided, as well.

The plot of the book is mainly two-tiered, with a lot of smaller subplots which all converge in the end. In the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, a body is fished out of the river, and detective Sidney Hurst has to deal with it. And it will be quite a deal, for the body is a North. A very problematic North, because no one seems to know who he is. All one can find out genetically is that he is a "2", but all of those are accounted for. And all the cyber-implants have been ripped from the body, so the guy did not just drunkenly fall into the river, he was murdered. Oh, and the fact that he has five puncture wounds in his chest might also be an indication. :P Something knife-like penetrated him there, and then those knives moved, and made mincemeat of his heart! When this MO is entered into a net search, VERY red flags go up in a lot of places, for this is how Bartram North and his entire household were murdered!!!! Which implies that the woman who has been in jail for two decades for this murder, the only survivor (she was working as a high-level hooker there), is not the murderer... And here tale of a horrifying bipedal alien monstrosity which killed everyone was not just some insanity plea gambit.
So while Hurst and Co. continue to hunt for the killers in Newcastle, Angelo Tramelo, Bartram's not-murderer, is released, but under orders to take part in a huge expedition into the heart of St. Libra's northern continent. The biology of this world is extremely mysterious. Lush jungle, completely alien, thrives under the harsh lightblast of Sirius, but there are no animals at all. And the genetic makeup of the plants is perfect, there is no more evolution. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that all the plant life was introduced in a terraforming event 1.5 million years in the past. The expedition sets out to determine if there is more genetic diversity away from the coast, which might explain the evolution of a sentient, powerful alien. And while Angela may not be Bartram's killer, she has a very mysterious past and an agenda of agendas on her own!

I really don't want to spoil the rest, but I'll talk about two more things:

The Zanth: Some SF stories are overflowing with aliens (think Star Wars). Others have none (Asimov's Foundation universe). In GNR, mankind has indeed had First Contact, but it is very, very different from what anyone expected. The Zanth aren't just aliens, "they" are ALIEN.
A short description of the Zanth I came up with was "quantum kudzu" - another would be "reality virus". Half a century before GNR takes place, the very first "Zanthswarm" hits a human colony world and wipes it out. Hundreds of klicks above the surface, space-time storms form, the fabric of reality itself tears asunder, and from an utterly unknown elsewhere, Zanth drops. Zanth is matter in a quantum state which differs from anything in our universe. Well, it is a solid, but the atoms and molecules, as far as they could be studied, have different physical properties from anything we know, or even anything that could and should exist in our universe. Chunks weighing thousands of tons drop meteorically from "orbit" (except they are not actually orbiting, and therefore just fall down), and while they partially burn up, they mostly survive, blasting huge craters. And then, the Zanth spreads. Everything it touches is converted into more Zanth, and with time, the molecular structures diversify. Following unfathomable principles, the Zanth forms insane and yet somehow beautiful bridges and towers many miles high, warping even gravity to prevent structural collapse. Dirt, humans, plants, animals, and even the friggin atmosphere itself becomes Zanth.
It is not possible to reason with Zanth. Zanth does not communicate, there are no separate mobile entities. Much indicates a technological level faaaar beyond anything we know, it is basically Clarke/God/Plancktech, and yet there seems to be no meaning, except for the utterly primitive directive to "procreate" and make more Zanth. In many ways, it's more like an ultra-advanced weapons system, a kind of Grey Goo variant, except no one knows who, or what, might be behind Zanth. Even the first swarmed planet has not been entirely converted, so any agenda is unknown.
Zanth is unstoppable. Once a Zanthswarm initiates, it proceeds until the planet is covered with so many "seeds" that conversion is inevitable. But while the first swarm caught humanity completely by surprise, the second one was anticipated. By that time, the Human Defence Alliance had been formed, a global military force (they are also running the expedition on St. Libra) which monitors all planets for space-time "earthquakes" that precede a Zanthswarm by hours. The US colony world New Florida is hit next, and here, dozens of fighters called Thunderthorns are launched from Earth to intercept the Zanth. This is done by creating Gateways in orbital space around the planet, and launching the ships from a military base on Earth. They accelerate down a runway and through the gate, shooting out into outer space and launching nukes at the Zanth. This principle is called a Wargate, and that is a link to a Magic card which precedes this book and works pretty much the same way. :-o The Zanth "fight back" by simply opening space-time rifts ever higher above the planet, out of reach of the Thunderthorns. And, of course, by sheer, never-ending numbers. What I thought was really cool was that at the end of the novel, the reader is no wiser about the Zanth. Not even the St. Libra Gaia entity understands the Zanth or knows where it comes from - but it is an old phenomenon, and the Gaia entity just "wishes the Zanth away, and it is gone"...

And finally, the epilogue of the book. One part I can tell without spoilers. It's 2377, and one of the protagonists, who had germline modification to gain a natural lifespan of a millennium, revisits the place where their story began - accompanied by several grandkids. That was rather fun, but then the very last paragraph of the book becomes a TOTAL mindfuck!!!! Angela's visit to her parents home on New Monaco was just a short detour. In orbit waits a ship... A "Nuii-Zanth conglobate made out of Quantum-Three-State matter". 150 km in diameter. Which "houses 80,000 entities on a trip to the Galactic Core." And the captain is a human. A woman named Lulu MacNamara, who actually took part in the St. Libra expedition - as a fucking COOK! A woman who was a total scaredy babe-in-the-woods who every once in a while "showed up" hiding in the background, scared witless. Who could not fight, seemed to have no character at all besides being afraid and being something of a running gag. Soooo... How did she become a fucking captain of a fucking Godtech starship? What even is "Nuii"? Was Zanth-matter successfully analyzed and replicated for more peaceful purposes??? The mind boggles!!!!! ~X( ~X( ~X( I've never, ever seen or read anything that screamed SEEEEEQUEL louder, but exactly in this case, it's entirely possible Hamilton is just totally trolling us...
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

After the tome... The tome!!! Neal Stephenson - Anathem really does hit 1000 pages. Right up front, my verdict: It's a really awesome book, but not as good as GNR. In certain ways, it's a much better book, it's like a Clive Nolan movie vs. Star Wars VII (except there are several Nolan movies I DO like more than the new SW).

This is really a quite hard book. A real nerd book. The first aspect is that it contains loads of neologisms which are relatively easy to decipher if you have a good knowledge of both English and Latin, but which may drive a lot of people crazy. Secondly, it's good if you studied math. And/or philosophy. In the acknowledgements, Stephenson credits a bunch of philosophers and mathematicians, like Gödel, for inspiration.

In a nutshell, the concept of the novel is pure genius. ^:)^ The story that is being told is really good, too, but the interspersed philosophical transactions sometimes become a bit tedious, a bit preachy, and they feel like the work of a really, really intelligent guy who has so much clout that he does not need an editor anymore, his fans will read everything he excretes. Wow, that sounded negative. It's really not that bad! Well, in MY opinion. Thing is, GNR is a fantastically written hard SF but also a bit space-opera-ish book I'd recommend to anyone who likes SF. Anathem is, in many ways, my type of book, but it may not be your type of book. Just like certain DnEs can't get into A Song of Ice and Fire. ;)

Anyway, so here is the concept: Anathem is, by all means, a SF novel, but it blends certain aspects we would label to be more "fantasy". It takes place on a planet that is decidedly not Earth (completely different map), and yet the people of that planet are humans. In a fantasy setting, we accept something like that without question, but SF for the very most part takes place in our universe, being either "mankind's future" or "the alien perspective". This one felt different. So, the technological level in the book is somewhat beyond our own, though many concepts are very familiar once you get past all the weird terms. There are, for example, jeejays and super-jeejays - which are just smart phones and tablets. There's video games and TVs and satellites and strip malls and cars and trucks.

But this all... This is just the Saeculum. The "profane", the outside world. The world we first get to know is the truly genius aspect of this book, the "Mathic World". The history of this civilization goes back over 7000 years, to a time roughly equivalent to the Minoan civilization (there's even a Thera-like volcanic eruption that plays a big role). There, a man had a vision. He tells it to his two daughters, who interpret it very differently. One thinks he has seen what we call Heaven, very much a Christian-like concept of a deity, and afterlife, etc. She goes on to form what becomes the world's dominant religion. The other thinks her father saw a perfect world populated by pure geometric forms, and all human ideas, especially the mathematical ones, trickle down from this "Hylean Theoric World" into our incomplete brains. This tradition leads to philosopher-scientists - think the ancient Greeks - and then they evolve into...

Monastic orders!!!

In this world, while the religion has their churches indeed, the whole concept of monasteries, convents, friars (called fraas and suurs) etc. is taken over by the scientists! :-o It's like... NERD FACTORIES!!!

On a timescale similar to our own world, these "Maths" develop more and more advanced technology, finally reaching a level at least decades, perhaps even centuries beyond what IRL Earth has. (For example, they invent a new form of perfected matter which reminded me quite a bit of the Zanth concept from GNR, except it does not gobble reality - instead, it emulates normal matter, just better and more flexible.) Well, shit goes down, and the "Terrible Events" happen, after several already terrible "Harbingers". Records are very sketchy, but it seems like a global nuclear holocaust.
No more particle accelerators for you! The scientists are taken away their toys, and they retreat/are imprisoned behind the walls of the Maths.

That was 3700 years ago.

In the following centuries, several "Sacks" happen, where mobs with burning pitchsporks storm the Maths and commit atrocities, because dem darn scientists still don't know their place! Each Sack is followed by even stricter rules, for example, all computers get banned from the Maths. While certain technology remains (and there is a class of people who are essentially engineers and mechanics who keep the gears grinding but are strictly separated from the fraas and suurs and are generally seen as "untouchables"), they are mostly left with their minds, implying that everything slows down a lot. Civilizations rise and fall outside the walls of the Mathic world, but it seems almost eternal.

Now, the separation between Saeculum and Mathic is not total. The Gates open, allow the people inside out into the Saeculum at special times. These times are nice and decimal. The one-year maths are essentially closed-campus universities. Most "avout" here are people from the Saeculum who come to study certain fields, and usually leave again after the year (or a few) to become businessmen, lawyers, politicians. Some, though, pass through a labyrinth into the next Math - the tenners. Fraa Erasmas, the first-person-perspective protagonist of the book, is one of those, though he joined, more or less under duress, when he was a kid of eight. At the beginning of the book, he is nearly eighteen and a decadal apert is approaching, the first time he will be allowed to leave the grounds of the Math since he joined. Furthermore, there are Hundreders, and the über-mysterious Millennials, who are rumored to have preternatural powers. Fuck yeah, they do!

The plot itself... Well, again, not to spoil too much. The decadal apert comes and goes, Erasmas meets a member of his family, and a while later, something happens out there in the world. Something BIG. And Erasmas and others - including a millennial - get called out to help solve a situation which will change the course of the world forever. (As you can see, the actual plot is rather more generic than the elaborate setting.)

One thing I loved was the use of astronomy in the book. A rather major plot point, for example, involves the use of a fisheye-lens all sky camera. Or a camera obscura room to perform clandestine stellar observations. On the roof of the Math, there is a large optical telescope, which uses laser-guide-star adaptive optics, which are also used as a plot point. Erasmas himself is a student of the main astronomer, so I really could identify a lot with this protagonist. :)

And just in case someone wants to be completely spoiled: :-! The BIG thing is the arrival of an alien spaceship which goes into orbit around the Sun, using an atomic pulse drive. After a long, arduous journey, Erasmas and his compatriots arrive at the island where that ancient volcanic eruption took place, where Erasmas rejoins with his teacher who had been exiled because he discovered the spaceship. A while later, a small capsule from the spaceship lands, containing... a human woman!!! Dying, murdered by a shotgun blast! Shortly thereafter, the not-so-alien ship launches an orbital BPS into the volcano!!!!! It turns out the "alien" actually is extremely alien, she is from another universe with slightly different quantum numbers. After lots of analysis and debate, a select crew get shot up to the alien spaceship and enter it. Fraa Jad, the Millennial, has the incredible superpower to "be in multiple narratives at the same time" - his consciousness can expand into parallel universes and choose the one where the outcomes of random events are maximally favorable!!! Only this allows the mission to proceed smoothly. In one such narrative Jad and Erasmas detonate themselves with the neutron bombs they swallowed, wiping out the entire alien starship - and this event in a single narrative "percolates" subconsciously into the others, creating a feeling of dread and resolving the civil war on the ship. A yes, the ship... It turns out that the whole philosophical rambling of the Hylean Theoric World has a core of truth. There are not only those "multiple narratives", but there is an "axis of perfection". Just as the avout believe there is a more perfect world beyond their own, it turns out their world IS the more perfect world for other universes "under them". The ship originated in one such universe, and then... it showed up in, I think, the 1980s of OUR OWN EARTH - indeed, the dead woman on the volcano? Earth woman. Her husband later infiltrates the big "convention" all the avout are attending. There are a total of four civilizations on the ship, each from a "higher" world, and iirc the two "lowest", most warlike, are in clash with Earth and the next higher (one below the world of Anathem). If the "more primitive" humans had prevailed, they would have held the world hostage with the threat of the "World Burner", a huge thermonuclear bomb.
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

First edit: Oopsie, I see I read What If? shortly after beginning Anathem, not Great North Road. Whatever.

Anyway, I used a short trip to an empty home (to pick up mail and generally check the house, as my mom was in the US) to read loads in Anathem, and I finished up the book some days after returning, mid-March. I used the following weekend to return to Moorcock (*slightsigh*). Seriously, I think Michael Morecock would be a geeky pornstar alias. :P Anyway! I had been hoping to get over 4000 pages read in March, so I went for low-hanging fruit - the "Best Short Fiction" books from the Michael Moorcock Collection - the first of my new books I had ordered in January.

Michael Moorcock - My Experiences In The Third World War And Other Stories: This one was the easiest - as I had remarked beforehand, it contained only a single story I did not know, a 75 page novella named The Cairene Purse. This story turned out to not be so good, actually. Protagonist is a man (who seems to be yet another von Bek, though there are no real connections to the normal von Bek novels and stories) working for the UN in mitigating the environmental damage created by the Aswan dam. I'm not really sure anymore, but I think this was the story which takes place roughly 2015-2020, and presents a pretty bleak future, much worse than the world we are living in. Ah, yes, it must be! There's actually a terrorist organisation mentioned in the book which bears a quite eerie resemblance to Al Quaida or ISIS - the story was written in 1990. Anyway, the man is also looking for his sister who has dropped off the face of the Earth. She's an archaeologist, and was hinting in her last letters that she was involved in a very important dig somewhere out in the desert in western Egypt. The story is something of a linear treasure hunt, von Bek pulls himself from clue to clue, always finding the name of one more person to talk to or one more place to visit. It was rather boring, and then suddenly his sister shows up out of nowhere, which pretty much invalidates his entire search. The resolution of the story, frankly, just sucked. Turns out the sister was gone because she met and boarded an UFO (!!!) at the dig, which brought her to a base on Mercury. There, she fell in love with an alien man - who seem to be very similar to humans anyway. Such a relationship was illegal, and she was brought back, but not after getting pregnant... Weeeeee.
The book also contains - of course - the great Third World War quadrilogy, as well as Moorcock's best (so far) short story, The Frozen Cardinal.

Michael Moorcock - The Brothel in Rosenstrasse and Other Stories: This is the shortest volume of the three, but the one I had the most to read in. The Opium General is the only story I knew beforehand.
The Brothel in Rosenstrasse: Oh, my...[\Takei] This is a nearly 200-page book, and it's a von Bek novel - in this case, it does make a few allusions to the illustrious von Bek history, but only to point out that this von Bek was the black sheep of the family who was pretty much cast out. It takes place at the end of the 19th century in Mirenburg, capital city of the little fictional country of Wäldenstein, which seems to be placed somewhere between the German Empire, Austro-Hungary and Czech. Mirenburg is modeled after Prague, but with a very strong German influence, all of the street names are German (and mostly even correct German). The first 30 pages of the book are a leisurely description of Mirenburg daily life, and they are undoubtedly, next to the fist 100 pages of An Alien Heat and The Frozen Cardinal, THE best thing I've ever read by Moorcock. Utterly enchanting!!!
This von Bek is a hedonist of the first order, and he has a 16-year old girlfriend called Alexandra :D , who he is instructing in all things sex and lust. After establishing Mirenburg, the two move into the eponymous brothel, which is headed by the Jewish matron Frau Schmetterling (Madame Butterfly ;) ), and there, the novel becomes pure, 200 proof erotic literature. Oh... My... At least within the Eternal Champion cycle, sex is a topic that comes up very, very seldomly, the heroes are either brooding questers who have lost the loves of their lives (Elric, Erekosë) or they are actually married to said love and have safe, consensual behind-bedroom-doors and under-the-covers sex lives (Hawkmoon, Corum for the most part). So, it's like Moorcock gathered all the deficit from all those other books and wrote this one PORN novel to make up for all of it. And don't get me wrong, it's great porn. Well, that is, if you have mostly hetero proclivities, although it also contains a lot of lesbianism (or at least bisexual exploration).
But then... then it all goes wrong. For war comes to Mirenburg (I indeed initially thought the novel played at the onset of WWI, but this is a fictional and regional conflict 15 years earlier), and the whole thing devolves into a gruesome depiction of atrocities and despair. And while, so much I shall reveal, both protagonists make it out in the end, or at least seem to, von Bek loses everything. ~X( Paradise Lost. Eden on fire. :( This was so utterly depressing after the fantastic beginning it caused me to downrate the book as a whole.
The writing style is also a bit hard to get into. The story is told by von Bek in autobiographical form, many years later. He has been deathly ill and bed-ridden, being cared for only by a morose old Greek dude. Now, he has recovered enough to begin writing down his tale, but it is told in a rambling, stream of consciousness way, with interjections concerning his momentary situation (and even musings about why his servant is so depressed) interspersed throughout. That is quite jarring at times, when you are deep in the action and suddenly read about totally unrelated stuff... Still, all in all, a fantastic story and one of Moorcock's best works.
London Bone: A short story playing sometime in the modern, in London, told from the perspective of a shady "merchant of goods". It details the discovery of the eponymous "London Bone", a kind of fossilized bone which is supposed to look totally awesome, and soon becomes THE "hot stuff" on the worldwide art market. Until it turns out to be human remains from old mass graves...
A Winter Admiral: A really short, very touching story of an old lady (yet another of the von Bek, or, in this case, Begg lineage) who is minding her little life, tending her garden, and finds an Admiral butterfly - in winter. :-s
Doves in the Circle: Stylistically, this story actually reminded me a lot of Stephen King! And, no, it's not horror at all. Deep in New York (Brooklyn, I think), there's a (likely fictional) circle road surrounding a little park. A young woman reacquaints herself with an elderly man after being apart for years. He's building a dove coot. He later takes her to his basement, and... non, no, nothing bad happens!! But the two exchange some pretty weighty secrets. Similar to the preceding story, it was, all in all, really "feel-good", made me smile.
A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club: God Himself shows up at the Surrealist Sporting Club and gives a Q&A. Could have been Douglas Adams, really funny.

Michael Moorcock - Breakfast in the Ruins and Other Stories: With The Time Dweller, Escape from Evening and A Dead Singer, this book contained three short stories I knew already. Furthermore, similar to Vol. 2, it starts off with a novel, though I skipped it as well because I wanted to read it later - see below. This left two tales:
London Flesh: A Sir Seaton Begg story also featuring Zenith the Albino. Very Sherlock Holmes-like. Quite good mystery tale.
Behold the Man (novella version): More on that right after these announcements...
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

Oookay, last book for now!

Michael Moorcock - Behold the Man and other Stories: This trade paperback omnibus contains three novels of typical Moorcock length, and therefore is similar in dimension to the Eternal Champion omnibus volumes. The title novel, then Constant Fire (in EC13 - Legends from the End of Time; this is also the censored version, so I could completely skip it), and finally Breakfast in the Ruins. The first and last are the two main Karl Glogauer novels.

Behold the Man: This is one of Moorcock's most famous and critically lauded books, and I tend to agree, it was really, really good. It first came out in, I think, 1966, as a 60-page novella - which I read first in above-mentioned short story collection, and was then expanded to twice that length in 1970. So, here, I read the entire novel just a day after the novella, and it was like watching a Director's Cut of a movie you know well, you keep going "This whole paragraph is new! And that sentence there was added too." The novella mostly contains the main plot, the novel expands upon this with loads of flashbacks to Glogauer's life, which makes the whole thing a bit Memento-like, as we get told how he ended up where the story starts only near the end of the book. Okay, time to issue a SPOILER WARNING :-!
Karl Glogauer is a conflicted young man living in contemporary London. He has a girlfriend, Monica, but their relationship consists mainly of disputes on philosophy. Glogauer is fascinated by Carl Jung, and Monica hates Jung. One of their main disputes regards the nature of the Christ. Monica, an atheist, acknowledges that Christ very likely existed as a person, but that all the miracle stuff was attributed to him later. Christ the human was first, the IDEA of Christ came only later. Karl thinks the opposite is the case. Well, as one finds out toward the end of the book, Monica dumps him, and, despair-ridden, he agrees to become the human guinea pig for a somewhat mad scientist who has devised a time machine! The one condition: Glogauer gets to decide when to go. And he chooses Galilee, roughly 29 AD. A year before the crucifixion. Because he still wants to answer the question: Christ the Human? Christ the Idea?
Which brings us back to the beginning of the story, and the main plot! Glogauer indeed lands in more or less the right place. He is found, injured from impact, by a religious grouping (the Essenes) who are led by John the Baptist! Which means he has come quite a bit too early. He asks for Jesus (indeed, he studied ancient Aramaic at university, enough to get by initially, and then he learns the language through interaction) but no one knows what he is talking about. Months later, an incident forces (the famous baptism during which Karl has something of a seizure) him out into the desert, and when he comes out, he is quite crazed. He begins to seek Nazareth, and finally finds, indeed, Joseph, Mary and Jesus. Joseph is a long-suffering carpenter with a bad reputation. Mary is, lets just say, a very... loose woman (in the novel, she has sex with Karl while Joseph is gone). And Jesus... Jesus of Nazareth? He is a mentally deficient imbecile, drooling and always running around, stealing other people's stuff because he does not know better!!! Ecce Homo! But the man is utterly useless! And here it dawns on Karl... It must become a self-fulfilling prophecy - HE MUST BECOME THE CHRIST!!!! As he already has the reputation of being a madman, that means he must be a prophet, and, more and more, he slides into the role. Some decisions are very conscious, done to fulfill the story the world will come to know. He gathers his twelve apostles, specifically asking for someone named Judas. He lets John the Baptist be executed. He goes to Jerusalem at the right time and gives Judas the mission of denouncing him to the Pharisees. Other aspects just form themselves, such as attaining the name Jesus of Nazareth. People heard he showed up there. Others heard he sought Jesus, son of Joseph. Soon, people thought he was from Nazareth, and that he was Jesus, son of Joseph... Of course, in the end, history forms itself, and Glogauer suffers through the Passion of the Christ. Only, at the very end, to have his body robbed off the cross by alchemists, and then be tossed away. Wow. Fucking downer ending. His last words were, repeated: "It's a lie."
As you may imagine, this book was quite controversial in certain parts of the world USA! USA! and Moorcock has some rather interesting things to say about that.

Breakfast in the Ruins: The beginning of this book threw me for a complete loop. You see, Moorcock may be, in general, best known for writing whole series revolving around a single protagonist (and of course especially the Eternal Champion meta-series). There's a bunch of Elric books and stories, seven on Hawkmoon, six on Corum, von Beks show up everywhere... Etc. So excuse me for assuming BitR would be something of a sequel to BtM, considering it was Glogauer again.
Instead, we rejoin a somewhat similar, in many ways different Glogauer sitting in a public garden in London. Nowhere are there any connections to BtM! Overall, it seems Glogauer is more of a concept than a single protagonist. This Glogauer is younger, unsure of what his life will become, and, in many ways, reminds me of GARY from Ma3. So when he is addressed by a big black man and invited to the man's hotel room, and a weekend of homosexual activity follows (something Glogauer had never done before), he acquiesces to it all quite passively. Well, initially.
This plotline is given in the first and last chapter, and dealt with in dialog at the almost end of all the intervening chapters. All these chapters end with text boxes labeled "What would you do?", in which one horrible situation after another is described to the reader, and they are asked to perform morally difficult decisions.
The main plots of the intervening chapters, though, deal with alternate lives of Glogauer. Each begins with his age (he starts at seven, each chapter has him exactly a year older), and gives his parents age, occupation, and mortality status - in some chapters, one or both are dead, disappeared, or simply unknown. Furthermore, the time these life snippets take place advances more and more, starting out in the late 19th century and moving on, in the last chapter, to a dystopian future where Glogauer is one of the last survivors of a nuclear-holocausted world (hence the books title). Furthermore, the sequence of chapters also deals with a life-by-life evolution from victim to survivor to self-made man to tyrant. At the same time, in the dialogs between Glogauer and his BBC lover, Glogauer assumes more and more control of the situation, while the former seducer and dominator becomes more grovelling and dependent. Finally, pretty much all the life snippets somehow involve political conflict between imperialists/oppressors and communists/anarchists/revolutionaries.
The life snippet chapters varied widely in atmosphere and, I felt, quality. Ones I liked were London 1905, aged 11, which I think was the longest chapter. He lives and works with his parents in a sweatshop, and is given the task to bring an underground communist to an illegal printing house. It all ends with a bombing, his parents are gravely injured but Karl manages to get a bucketload of money off the dead communists and promises his parents a free life. It's the beginning of the "survivor" phase. The next one, Calcutta, 1911, age 12, was also cool, Karl, despite his youth, is a drug dealer and budding criminal mastermind. Someone tries to trick him but Karl wins in the end. Many of the following stories deal with WWII and the Holocaust (Karl, in all his incarnations, is always Jewish), and these are already quite gruesome...
The very first and the last two stories before the final, post-apocalyptic one are extremely harsh. In the first, Karl is just a kid fleeing with his mom through a partially destroyed Paris during a civil uprising. His mom is shot and he, helpless, accompanies her dying body after she is heaved on to a cart with all the other corpses and gets dumped into a mass grave! X_X In Kenya, 1959, Karl is a total chav and interrogator trying to get information about a native uprising by using a prisoner's balls and cock to press out cigarettes... And finally, Vietnam, 1968, Karl is part of a troop of GIs that rapes and massacres an entire Vietcong village. Especially this latter one was beyond the pale in terms of the atrocities described. :ymsick:
All in all, I liked the book a lot less than BtM. While it is very well thought out and written, the whole meta-style is not really to my taste. What can I say, I'm a simple man... ^#(^
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

Cheezus Crust!! I haven't posted in this thread in like 16 months!! :-o (Did you enjoy the silence? :P )

And it's not because I was not reading - just the opposite! This year is turning into a record-breaker! :-bd Okay, it seems unlikely I will top the 63 books of 2015, but yesterday, I managed two things - I crossed the 15,000 pages mark for 2017, and I finished book #31, reaching the same number as 2016 (on which I'll report... sometime later...)! :) I've been planning to get back to writing about books for some weeks now, but yesterday's "events" seemed as good a starting point as any. I've been home for two weeks now, and after finishing the book I had gotten for my trip - see below - I was waiting on another book to arrive - see also below - and started, in lieu, a different Moorcock book, which I am still far from finishing... :-Q

But yesterday, my mom was finally gone most of the day, I had peace and quiet, I could read, so I did...

DAY 2.6 :D

Yes, indeed, 40 Books in Two Weeks! It still exists, and I am not finished with the second week. I had just rediscovered my book column for this project, and decided upon some Robert Silverberg books, but then some further research in my other books led to three volumes I had for some reason completely overlooked before! :-o They were all around 200 pages long but with big font size and looked like fast reads, and indeed they were!

Ben Bova & Gordon B. Dickson - Gremlins Go Home: Most definitely a YA novel, and, considering the state of the art of SFX technology, this could be made into a likely quite fun movie, including some innovative uses of 3D. It was written in 1974 and I expect it is supposed to take place in some near future (as seen from 1974) where the Americans did not drop the space program so hard. For here, at Cape Kennedy, the Mars rocket sits on the launch pad! :x The protagonist is a kid, and son of the launch director for the rocket. Dad is always away at work, but he and Mom recently made a baby sister and now mom is always occupied with her, so the kid is often alone. He is very environmentally minded and loves riding around on his bike in the big Wildlife Preserve on the Cape, accompanied by his trusty sheepdog Shep. After a tumble, he awakens to hear Shep... talking... with a leprechaun. :| Said creature, which actually calls itself a Gremlin, is named Baneen, and speaks in a decidly Irish accent - whereas "Mr. Sheperton" (he henceforth insist on being called by his full name) has a snooty English accent. Baneen and all the other Gremlins are actually an alien race from Planet Gremla, which seems to be... Mars. They are immortal, and have been stranded on Earth for millions of years. And they have guided mankind's evolution so that Man finally reaches the technological prowess to build a rocket so they can return to Mars!! You see, they like it dry, and they really dislike iron and steel, and their magic (which is actually their science) is strongly hampered on Earth. So they enlist the kid to get them and their magical space kite on to the crew module (stuck to the outside) of the Mars rocket.
All in all, this was a fun romp, though a bit childish. It had a lot of illustrations in it, and especially these were, dare I say it... kinda racist at times? :-\ So it turns out that human accents are just variations of gremlin accents, e.g., that's no Irish accent, that's people from Ireland imitating how Gremlins talk. And the chief engineer is a "Japanese" Gremlin named O'Rigami (and of course Japanese humans learned paper folding from him), and in the illustrations, he looks like this totally cliché buck-toothed "jap/chink" character. I mean, seriously, like this... It really weirded me out, and I'm not even a guy who is sensible for such things. I took just a bit over two hours to read it.

With this book, I leaped over 15,000 cumulative pages.

Ben Bova - Out of the Sun/The Amazing Laser: This might not have made the cut originally because it is over 220 pages, but again it was a really big font. It's essentially a novella of about 90 pages and a long popular-science essay of 130 pages.
The novella deals with... airplanes and lasers! :D The Americans have developed a long-range interceptor called the "Mach 3 Arrow", kind of their equivalent of the Mig-25 Foxbat. Only some prototypes exist. The first one is doing a patrol over the Arctic Ocean when it comes across a Soviet supersonic bomber of new design, and suddenly... it desintegrates. The solid-state physicist who designed the alloy the plane is made of gets recalled from his civilian life to research whether the plane just broke apart due to material fatigue. He is sure it's not the fault of "his" metal, but then the second and third planes, also upon happening upon this Soviet plane, break apart within seconds. There are no indications of missiles fired, and videos recovered from the planes just... stop right before breakup. All three planes have spent about 100 hours at Mach 3, so what if it really is a fatigue problem??
This was actually a nicely done detective story with some decent science in it. I liked how the protagonist was stumped for a long time, and how tests were devised to probe the material. In the end, we find out the Soviet bomber was a giant flying laser platform. Firing even a strong laser at the special alloy hardly harms it - at 0 velocity and sea-level air pressure! But include the stress of Mach 3 flight, and even a small puncture caused by the laser causes the plane to shred like a watermelon with a firecracker in it.
And how do the Soviets know this will work? The protagonist's own colleague spied for them! In the end, they paint the last plane with laser-reflective paint [my one grumble: How does that stuff stand long-term Mach 3 flight?], encounter the bomber again,
which now can't harm the fighter anymore. They "fly rings around it", showing how easily they could kill it, and the Evil Commies scamper home with their tails between their legs.

The second part deals with the Laser and its history, of course starting off with the history of humanities' discovery of light and electromagnetism. I knew most of the stuff in here, except for a lot of the historical detail. It was really interesting to see how within just the first half of the 60s, most of the Laser technology we know today was invented already. With perhaps the exception of X-ray lasers, which find no mention at all, pretty much everything else has been refinement (especially highly efficient diode lasers).

Ursula K. Le Guin - Buffalo Gals and other Animal Presences: A short-story collection dealing with things from the animal (and vegetable) perspective. I seriously wonder if this book has some kind of cult following within the furry community, it sure feels like it would be really enticing for them. Except for the title novella, written explicitely for this collection, this contains reprints, though some of the poems had not seen print either, I think. Of the poems, I admittedly only liked one, named "For Leonard, Darko and Burton Watson" - cats, seemingly, who probably accompanied the author in her life.
Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight: Okay, this is like THE furry story. :P A young girl, who may be named Myra but is just called "Gal," awakens, injured, after a plane crash in the wilderness. Looking at her is Coyote. Not "a coyote", but a small, mostly human-looking woman who nonetheless has a lot of aspects of Coyote, the trickster, in her. She sure is uncouth, she curses, she squats over fires and pisses them out, she shits in public and talks to her turds as if they were her children, and she is unapologetically promiscous, even fucking in public. :P Coyote partially heals the girl and takes her to her village, which is populated by further human-looking animal archetypes. There is Ms Chipmunk with her brood of children, and the dangerous shaman Rattler, and many others (all native to the American Southwest). The girl's injured eye is replaced by one made of pine sap, she chooses Coyote as her new mom, and tries to live among the humanimals. But she also wonders of she can return to humankind, and enlists the boisterous Horse ("He came with the New People") to take her to a human settlement. But there, everything throbs and hums and smells burned and decayed... While superbly written, this tale felt very heavy-handed on the whole "First Nations = harmony with Nature; 'New People' = destruction of Nature" theme...
Mazes: This one was a-Maze-ing! :D A creature, clearly intelligent, self-aware, tells us of how it was captured and cruelly tortured by a giant (four limbs, walks on two legs, nearly hairless and pale... Get it?). In one weird aspect, the Protagonist-Creature eats only certain leaves, but directly off the tree. For whatever (plot? :P ) reason, picking these leaves causes them to become indegistible. The Captor-Alien is not aware of this, but seems to know about the leaves in general, so it has been giving Protagonist-Creature picked leaves only. No matter how much Protagonist-Creature eats, it is starving, it is dying. Captor-Alien must have some kind of intelligence too, for it has built mazes for Protagonist-Creature. And the race of Protagonist-Creature communicates by elaborate dances through elaborate mazes! :-o It contemplates the Maze all night, then "performs the eight Maluvian in its entirety." Captor-Alien seems to not understand, and just puts Protagonist-Creature back into the "baby maze" - such an insult. We also get a hint that Protagonist-Creature is deaf. It observes Captor-Alien to move its mouth in complicated ways, but nothing indicates that sound is being heard. "What... we've... got here... is failure to communicate." And so, Protagonist-Creature will Dance its Death. SAD! (If the story needs some interpretation, my guess is that Captor-Alien is a human researcher, probably in a spaceship that has landed on an alien planet, and it is keeping Protagonist-Creature as a pet and treating it like a rat, unaware that it is sentient...)
The Wife's Story: This was group into the same "slot" as Mazes, which made it a bit predictable, as a plot twist along the lines of "But it was I, Dio, all along!" just had to happen. What starts like a typical werewolf story (wife notices husband leaving at weird times, returning exhausted and hurt), twists when we read the weird time is "when the Moon is full darkness, in the bright Sun of noon". For the "people" in the story are actually a wolf pack and the man is transforming into a human! :-o The pack then tear this abomination to pieces.
The Direction of the Road and Vaster than Empires and More Slow: Coming upon this block, I immediately recognized the second story as the fantastic SF story from The Wind's Twelve Quarters! :) Yay, over 30 pages I can skip. I started on the other one but quickly realized I knew it too, same source. Back then I had just written "On Inertial Systems. Highly creative." And very obscure. :P So this story is about the thoughts of an old, old tree at the side of a human road, which, over many decades, witnesses the evolution of human transport, and how their life becomes more and more hectic. The true uniqueness - and where my comment came from - is that it has the impression, um, either that it itself is travelling, or that humans grow and diminish in size (instead of coming closer and then moving away again)...
The White Donkey: What if a mythical beast shows up in a part of the world that has no knowledge of this myth? A young Indian girl, herding her goats, sees a white donkey with a single horn in the woods...
Horse Camp: As seen by teenage horses. Or something. This one had some really skewed perspectives...
Schrödinger's Cat: A strange tale. A dog comes to a woman's house to stick the cat into the Box of Schrödinger to finally get rid of its uncertainty. Box is opened, cat is simply gone. Fuck you, dog.
"The Author of the Acacia Seeds" and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics: Another tale of pure genius in the form of three scientific journal articles... written in a world where seemingly all animals are sentient and communicate in writing and create art - you just have to know what to look for. The first tale deals with a manuscript found in an anthill, where an unknown ant had penned messages with phermones on dead acacia seeds. The final messages read "Eat the eggs!" and "Up with the queen!" (In Ant, up is of course what we humans call down in its negative connotation - so correctly it means "Down with the queen!") The second treatise deals with the kinetic group-poetry of Adelie penguins, danced out while they fly underwater, and muses on what efforts must be undertaken to record the solitary poems of Emperor penguins, recited in ruffle of feather and twitch of toe while they stand in eternal Arctic night sheltering their eggs. The final editorial asks how vegetable and even rock art might be discovered.
May's Lion: An interestingly written short tale. Seems an... aunt (?) of Ursula K. Le Guin told her a long time ago that, an even longer time ago, when she herself was younger, she had a mountain lion visit her at her farm. Very likely sick and dying. She called neighbors, followed their advice, called the police, who shot the animal. Then Le Guin rewrites the story into a version where Aunt May, now known as Rains Fell (because that's what happens in May), does not call the police.
She Unnames Them: Eve, in the Garden, is sick of it all, unnames all the animals (the cats insist they have always had their own, individual names and have rejected the term "cat" on general terms =)) ), and leaves, taking them all with her. Rather... peculiar.

I finished the book at 23:57!! :ymparty: So not just a "Day" in terms of a single wake cycle, but even within a date day! (And good so, cause I was getting really tired) In total, I only read 7.7 hours, the shortest of all my Days so far.
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Don Alexander
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

So, after my first report of my newest reading, let me catch up with my buying of books! :P

So, shortly after following my last report and my last posts in mid-April 2016, I received Blaze and Spook Country. But The Confusion never came. :( Luckily, I got my money back, and was able to order it again at a later date.

Yes, indeed, Neal Stephenson! In late May, though I had hardly made progress with my reading, I ordered a bunch of his books, mostly filling out my bibliography: The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Interface, Cobweb, and of course The Confusion, as well as one book I'll not read for a while, The Mongoliad Book One, which is part of a multimedia project by multiple writers. Iirc the first two books are mainly by Stephenson, the other three (or more?) are not. I was not able to find them cheaply, same for Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, which I got new for more than ten Euros each. Aaaactually, this whole order was a very belated birthday present from my mom. These books arrive from early to late June.

The next batch of books were also presents!! But in different directions. I had gotten Stephen King's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams for my mom's birthday, but, in this case, I had not read it yet (or even beforehand). For Christmas, she got, from the same author, the third and final chapter of the Bill Hodges Trilogy, End of Watch.
And she got me AWESHUMZ LOOT!!! :ymdevil: :ymdevil: :ymdevil: The first two items I unpacked were DVD boxes, both seasons of the awesome Swedish TV series Äkta Människor (Real Humans - the original). I knew the first season, but it had somehow disappeared... And the second one had only recently appeared. Up next was a book I had actually pointed out as a possible Christmas gift, James Gleick's Time Travel - A History. That still left a really big package... And it was the most awesome gift of all!!! =p~ =p~ @-) @-) Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy: The Three-Body Problem/The Dark Forest/Death's End!!!!! I had seen the first book again and again on Goodreads' recommended lists, and finally looked it up. Cixin Liu is China's most well-known and successful SF author, and finally, with good translations, his books are coming to the West. I had mused asking my mom to gift me these, but I forgot - and now she had bought them for me, completely independently coming across them!!! That's like, the BEST kind of gift!!! Oh, to be precise, the third book was, at this time, still in transit. But it came right after Xmas.

Time passes... I'm off to Spain. I take with me: Everything I have from Peter F. Hamilton, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, as well as several Michael Moorcock Books and one from Robert Silverberg. After already reading quite a bit, I decide to go completist. I order the newest Peter F. Hamilton duology: Chronicles of the Fallers: The Abyss Beyond Dreams and Night without Stars (I had mentioned these years back, indicating I'd not be able to read them until 2016...). Then the newest William Gibson: The Peripheral, and the newest Neal Stephenson: Seveneves. The latter is temporarely out of stock... and I still have not received it! X( Like once a month Amazon sends me a mail telling me they are still trying to get it. Come on! How hard can it be??

These books had come from early to mid May, and two weeks later, I order my mom's birthday gift, one of the most expensive per page books ever: Stephen King: Gwendy's Button Box. This seems to be - for now at least - a very limited edition, a hardcover with illustrations. Amazon.es kinda sucks because even book orders there cost shipping, though you get free shipping if your stuff is worth >€19. This book actually cost slightly more...

My final acquisitions (for now :P ) derived from some obsessive/compulsive behavior of mine... :ymblushing: So, yeah, I've been reading a ton of Michael Moorcock over the last two years, but there's still another fuckton left. The books I took with me were two of the three Jerry Cornelius omnibus volumes, one from the new Michael Moorcock Collection, with short stories, and one from wayyyy back (Essen, I guess), containing four complete novels, 1000 pages. My plan was to read the short stories in Spain, take the fat tome with me for the trip... Then, while browsing multiverse.org, I found out that there were three versions of this omnibus, one from 1977 in which parts of one book were cut out, one from 1979 with the parts restored and a new intro, and then the one from the MMC, which contained "further revisions". While it did turn out I had the 1979 version, I really wanted the newest of the new!! So I immediately went to Amazon and ordered Michael Moorcock: The Cornelius Quartet (the old version is Chronicles instead of Quartet). I knew it would never arrive in time, though. So it was my luck that I actually found it was by far the cheapest in Germany! GB? like 19 fucking Pounds Sterling! Spain? €17!! Germany? €3.15 + €3 S&H! :P So I had it sent to my mom's house.
But this left me with a problem. I was not far from finishing the short stories. I'd run out of reading material if I took just them. I did not want to take/read the Chronicles, as I had just ordered the newest revised version! And the only other books I had were Stephenson's massive Baroque Cycle, starting the first would pretty much imply taking the other two... So I needed... A NEW BOOK!
I researched, and found Granada indeed has an "International English Bookstore" :) In the center of town. Was a bit of a bitch to find parking reasonably nearby. Google had informed me that, like many Spanish businesses, they close for siesta in the afternoon, reopening at 5. I was there after 6... What Google had not told me was that in Summer (up until late September, actually), they do not open at all in the afternoon >_>
Luckily, I remembered another (used) bookstore, went there, and they indeed had a section of English books! But nothing of interest, it seems... Until finally my eyes happened upon Iain M. Banks: Look to Windward, a hardcover! Ohhhhh! I read The Algebraist over a decade ago and loved it - this must be good too. There was no price in it, so the man gave it to me for six Euros. :) But it said something on the front that worried me "The new Culture Novel". Well, turns out most of Banks' dozen or so books are set in this one Universe (The Algebraist is a standalone), and this is #7! I can't read this now!!! :((
So I drove to a gigantic shopping mall which has a multimedia store, a French chain named fnac. I had been there once before and noted they had a very nice SF/Fantasy section - in Spanish 8-| But, yeah, they had English too. Damned, expensive... I did find Dracula and Frankenstein for really cheap, just €3.25 each, and also a NEW Michael Crichton book :-o :-o :-o on dinosaur-bone hunters in the Wild West - that was already €16. Then my eyes boiled over and my mind blew!!!! A large trade paperback: Cixin Liu: The Wandering Earth!!!!!!!!!!! A short story collection, superduper new, Head of Zeus like my other Liu books (Goodreads claims expected publication date is October 2017...). OH GOD €19.25!!! But wtf, I had to have this. And so it became my travel book!
Finally, concerning my Cornelius book, yes, it did come, but, like, maximally disappointing. I had ordered it on a Thursday morning, it was sent on Friday, and it was stated it would arrive Saturday, Monday, or Tuesday. It arrived... Tuesday. While we were gone. :( Much too thick to fit into the mailbox. :( I had to go pick it up... on Wednesday! X( By that time, I had started another Moorcock book, but more on that elsewhere...

EDIT 01. 09. 2017: So, a few days ago, I received another mail from amazon.es - now finally telling me that they can't send me Stephenson's Seveneves. :( My best guess is that I somehow managed to order a specific edition that had a limited print run (without actually being special) and they were trying to get me that exact version instead of some kind of English-language paperback. Anyway, free now, I just went and ordered it off of amazon.de, for, I think, actually a bit less money (and definitely another edition). And while we're at it, I also ordered the newest book: Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland: The Rise And Fall Of D.O.D.O.! The books arrived two days later, quite a package, thick things...
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

So, now for a little jump into the past...

As I have mentioned, I have been reading a lot this year. It's now the beginning of August, just days before my trip to Germany. I had brought a box of books with me to spain, and all that is left is Stephenson's Baroque Cycle as well as two Michael Moorcock books of the Jerry Cornelius series. Instead of starting with the chronologically earliest works, the above-mentioned Cornelius Chronicles (which I then reordered, see above), I began with...

Michael Moorcock: Jerry Cornelius: His Lives and His Times: JC (I see what you did there, Moorcock...) is likely, after Elric of Melniboné, MM's second-most known creation. And judging from the three fat omnibus volumes I have, his most-written-about creation as well. While JC is also seen as an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, the main Eternal Champion saga just contains some side-incarnations like that "Colonel Jerry Cornelius" from The Distant Suns, or Jaspar Colinadous with Whiskers, or Jehamiah Cohnahlias, the Spirit of the Runestaff from the Hawkmoon novels. There are also many JC short stories by other authors, and I had read a few in Pawns of Chaos.
This book is a short story collection based on two older collections, "The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius" and "The Nature of the Catastrophe". Each of them underwent multiple editions and thereby expansions, and, seemingly excepting an intro, all of this and more has landed in this volume, from the Michael Moorcock Collection. "The New Nature of the Catastrophe" contains a lot of Cornelius stories by other authors, though, which are not included here, so I need to get that book one day.
I'm not even sure where it really came from, but I always had the impression I'd not really like the Cornelius books... He is mostly a child of the late '60s, very hippie-esque, counterculture and generally zany in a "we need to write stuff that is very different from the stuff written before!" way... And so far, I have been proved to be right!
The first story is called The Peking Junction, and it totally blew me away. In a negative sense. It was not even "WHAT THE FUCK?!", it was just "what". In it, it seems the US has decided to continue WWII, is bombing all of Europe to bits, and JC travels to China where he meets three generals at a peaceful mountain lake, gets them all to fall in love with him, fucks one, kills him and, um, extracts his essence or so before returing to The West, mission accomplished. :| This somehow sounds more sane the story actually was, it consisted of a lot of short chapters (some consisting of two words...) with titles that had nothing to do with the plot, some newspaper articles, even excerpts from books which exist within the Elric saga... The next story was a bit more coherent, the third (The Tank Trapeze) even made sense, pretty much, though the plot is JC in southern Asia, hunting a child (seemingly one of those "next messiah" kids) and shooting him in the anus with a heater while he is praying. :|^2 At least this one had an interesting article from The Guardian on the Prague Spring split up as chapter headers.
Finally, after 200 pages, with The Entropy Circuit, there's a perfectly servicable tale! Bad guys are destroying the world by sucking up energy and accelerating entropy, so everything outside some cathedral in London is rotting away extremely rapidly. JC and a motley crew* enter the sewers and put an end to it. Straightforward, coherent, fun! (* Concerning the motley crew, it seems many characters in the JC stories are archetypes, partially of classic comedia dell'arte. In somewhat later stories, you have the venerable Una Persson; there is JC's sister Cathy, his ever horrible, ever-surviving mother, the grossly fat Bishop Beesley, and Miss Brunner, sometimes boss, sometimes enemy, who represents the stiff Rule of Law and everything JC does not stand for. These characters show up in differing roles in most of the stories, which does, I admit, represent nicely the whole "multiverse" concept.)
Anyway, hopes of this being a turning point were soon dashed... But with The Spencer Inheritance I got one more awesome story. Penned soon after the death of Princess Diana (and rather weird to be reading it close to the 20th anniversary...), it details how Britain has devolved into a horrible civil war, the Dianists are slaughtering everyone else (Monarchist, Tories, Labour...) in the name of their deified messiah. JC and his motley crew, for once pretty much working together (or not...) travel by tank through ravaged landscapes to rob Diana's corpse and sell it for profit. But when they finally reach the grave monument, it is gone, stolen by JC's despicable brother Frank, and sold to Procter & Gamble for cloning!!! =)) =)) =)) Several more stories follow, and I'll give honorable mention to Epilogue: The Dodgem Decision, in which JC drives around, musing fantasy novels and the publishing business. So it was actually an op-ed piece disguised as a short story. I did not even agree with it, but at least it made sense.
All in all, I was left with a very disappointing experience. I realize MM is an accomplished writer, and many people like the JC stories, but this was just not my cup of English breakfast tea. It's the first book in a long time I gave only 2/5 on Goodreads. Additionally, my dislike was increased by my desire to finish it before leaving for Germany, and in the end I almost ran out of time, wrapping it up at 3 in the morning, 4 hours before I had to leave with a colleague for the bus station. :|

Cixin Liu - The Wandering Earth: But of course I had a new, awesome book to read for my trip!! :-bd I have not reported on the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy yet, so I'll give an opinion here on Liu: This guy has a fantastic imagination, he comes up with absolutely crazy awesome shit, BUT... He has two problems. For one, he seems to have a bad opinion of humanity in general, people in his stories are often depressed and despairing. Secondly, he knows jack shit about physics - at least partially. Actually, it is pretty flabbergasting, I had the feeling several times he read like half a Wikipedia article and ignored the rest...
Anyway, this is a short story collection, many of them won awards in China, and they were written in the late '90s, early 2000s. The compilation (seemingly with one extra story missing here :( which deals with ants battling dinosaurs ) was already published as a Kindle edition several years ago.
The Wandering Earth: Sooo... The Sun will explode. Well, not totally. But it will undergo a helium flash, which will roast the inner planets and blow off parts of the gas giants. Then it will swell into a red giant and eat the inner worlds. This was a perfect example of the "half-read Wiki page" effect. Yes, helium flashes are a part of stellar evolution. They occur when so much helium "ash" has accumulated in the core of a star that pressure and temperature reach the point where fusion into oxygen initiates, and this process indeed causes a flash-like burning to set in. Also, the sun will swell into a red giant and swallow at least Mercury and Venus. BUT! a) This will occur in more than 5 billion years, not tomorrow. b) The sun will first swell into a red giant due to more efficient shell burining of hydrogen around the helium core, then the flash occurs and it actually decreases in luminosity and enters the "helium main sequence". c) Most of all, the radiation from the core of the sun takes like a million years to trickle out to the surface, even a helium flash gets totally dampened by this process and in no way manifests as a huge nova-like outburst that lasts just seconds!! *takes deep breath*
Anyway, Earth is doomed, or is it? No, mankind rallies, builds titanic fusion drives, thousands of them, which point up. They brake Earth's rotation, and then slowly accelerate it away from the sun toward Proxima Centauri (allegedly planetless :P And, no, you can't see Proxima with the naked eye. >_>). Earth itself will become a generation ship, using a Jupiter gravity slingshot to reach the third cosmic velocity. But then all indications are that the sun will NOT explode, and revolution foments. Well, it then does explode, despite all measurements and probes stating the opposite... ??? By then, the revolters have slaughtered almost everyone involved in the project... Despite some hair-raising mistakes, this was a really awesome idea.
Mountain: A sailor on a ship is asked by his captain why he never leaves the ship when they reach port. The man admits to feeling responsible for the deaths of several friends while climbing Mount Everest (including his girlfriend). He is an avid mountaneer and is now punishing himself by being as far from the mountains he loves as possible. But then a titanic alien ship appears in geostationary orbit (think Independence Day: Resurgence size), creating a tidal water mountain in the middle of the Pacific. Again, stupid half-knowledge. Yes, such a water bulge would appear, but it would be spread out across the whole face of the Earth! It would not be a rather localized 10 km high mountain! Anyway, the ship wants to flee but the man grabs a surfboard and decides to swimclimb the highest peak on Earth! :-bd Which is much easier than thought, since it's actually not a mountain, just a warped equigravitational surface, so there is no incline at all. At the top he is tossed into a raging storm, and just before he might die, he is stabilized, and looks up toward the ship/moon. And it starts communcating with him, telling the story of the alien race. They are machine life, fully inorganic, which developed in vacuum within what is actually their home planet (not very logical either, but...)! They reach sentience and technology and begin exploring the rock of the planet, discovering gravity, water (extremely lethal!) - and finally, outer space. This whole concept was mind-blowingly awesome!!!
Sun of China: A young, almost illiterate man moves from village to town to city, always striving for a better salary as well as cleaner water. In the city he becomes a high-rise cleaner. When China launches a gigantic solar power station into orbit, he becomes one of the first cleaners of this huge mirror. Finally, mankind is ready to shoot for the stars, and he is elected the first solo pilot. Great story, heartwarming.
For the Benefit of Mankind: Yet more crazy awesome. John Wick meets Alien Invasion. It turns out that mankind was actually seeded on five different worlds (echoes of Le Guin's Hainish), and now the most advanced of these mankinds has come to Earth to take over the planet. Original Earth mankind will be sent to Australia where everyone will have exactly the same living standard - namely the one of the poorest person on Earth! A bunch of superrich people band together to distribute all their wealth to the poor to raise the general standard of living before the alien mankind does its census. But there seem to be some problems, and the shadowy cartel hires an assassin to remove those problems. The other part of the story are flashbacks of how the assassin went to train, and this is the John Wick part, and it was sooooo cool. Seriously, I feel this could be turned into a corny but somehow awesome movie.
Curse 5.0: Hilarious satire. A jilted girl writes a virus, Curse, which curses her former boyfriend. She's a good programmer and the virus spreads rapidly, but since all it does is print this curse on the screen once, then deactivates, it is deemed so harmless that no antivirus software deals with it. Years later, another hacker takes on the source code and starts expanding it. Meanwhile, Cixin Liu himself shows up in the story, as well as another Chinese SF author (I'm sure also real, and a friend of Liu, this one writes "soft" space opera and romance), both of them are homeless and destitute because they suuuuck so badly at writing. :P These two come across the virus code, and change some stuff to wildcards, dooming the Earth...
The Micro-Era: After being gone from Earth for a long, long time, an explorations ship returns with a single surviving crewman (another one of these weird knowledge discrepancies - the ship flew more than a 1000 light years and studied 60 star systems up close, finding only a single planet which was a molten rock. This of course flies totally in the face of modern exoplanet research which shows that likely the majority of all stars have planetary systems and roughly Earth-like planets exist by the billions... So they are capable of building a near-lightspeed ship but not capable of remotely studying the stars to see if it's even worth to travel there???). He finds a bleak an barren Earth! :( But then he nearly steps on... an entire city the size of a mushroom! Turns out mankind has shrunk itself (heh, and soon, there's this movie "Downsizing" coming out!) and Earth's population is actually in the trillions. Definitely the weakest story of the book, the whole premise was just stupid. Oh, did I mention all of the wee ones are ridiculously happy and are led by a teenage girl??
Devourer:A gas-giant sized alien warship, the Devourer, crewed by a Dinosaurian race (who, spoiler, actually ARE the descendants of Dinosaurs) approaches Earth to... devour it! They send an emissary, basically a sentient T-Rex (with stronger, longer arms :P ) who mocks feeble mankind. But mankind shall strike back. Reasonably good story with an awesome space battle at the end - what is it like when planet-size ship attacks planet turned into ship?
Taking Care of God: There came a day when several very, very old people appeared in a city on Earth. Clad only in white robes, the men with long white beards. In heavily accented local language, they tell passerbys: "We are God. Seeing as we created you, can you spare us some food?" It turns out they are right! They are an extremely ancient alien race that engineered the entire history of Earth toward bipedal sentient beings... so that these could take care of them in their old age, their decrepitude! They live very long, several thousands of years, but spent most of that on their ships near lightspeed, so billions of years passed at rest while only thousands passed in their inertial system. The story focuses mostly on a single Chinese family and their God. This family, once doing quite well, has now descended into poverty because of their God, and the rest of Earth suffers with them, as there are about two billion Gods! The husband is a weakling, his wife a screaming tyrant... All in all, not likeable people at all. Generally, a parable on how we treat our elders.
With Her Eyes: It's the moderately distant future, man is exploring/ploiting the Solar System. Your average asteroid miner doesn't make the wages to return to Earth for vacation, so people on Earth wear their "eyes". A combination of Google Glass and Oculus, these glasses transmit everything the wearer sees to another person who then "travels" with them on vacation. Newest developments of neurotech allow other senses to be shared as well. Of course, this raises privacy issues, but it's a nice extra income for anyone who is willing to have another person ride piggyback. I loved this concept, it sounded like something that will definitely be realized once the technology is available. So, a man dons a pair of eyes, and the girl he is linked to asks him to go to the surface of Earth, out in the countryside, and walk through a wild field of grass, touch the flowers, sleep under the stars... A very simple task. The man is initially rather bothered as he himself is a city person and has no appreciation for nature, but the night changes him. As there is no appreciable delay, he surmises his co-vacationeer must be in low-Earth orbit. He even asks her for a date but she must decline. Months later, he finds out she is the pilot of a geodiving vessel - think The Core! - that got trapped in an extrusion of Earth's liquid core. While her life-support systems will allow her to exist for a long time yet, she will never be able to return to the surface and walk through grass, smell the flowers or sleep under the stars. An extremely moving story.
Cannonball: A semi-pre/sequel to the preceding story. A physicist works on a unique project. In the effort of ridding the Earth of nuclear weapons, many are actually detonated underground in controlled settings. The man has invented a special material that wraps the bomb, and, when exposed to the incredible heat and pressure, does not disintegrate but is compressed into a new phase of matter which has fantastic properties. But this work is killing him, he has Leukemia, and he goes into cryogenic storage in the hopes of being cured in the future. He says goodbye to his wife and ten-year old son, telling her if no cure is possible, she should wake him when she herself is old and near death, so that they can truly rest in peace together. But then... He is awoken, and cured! But his wife is dead! She did not want to wake him because the Earth has become a destitute place. He is hardly out of cryosleep when a bunch of thugs kidnap him and toss him in a deep hole to die. It turns out that this is a tunnel through the center of the Earth! From a city in China to Argentina. Made possible by that new supermaterial. And it was built at the instigation of the man's son!! Who became this totally driven genius physicist - but at the same time, the project depleted the Earth's resources and cause a global financial collapse. The thugs are killing him for petty revenge because he is the father... He also finds out that his son is dead, and had travelled the tunnel for many years when it was not in use any more, talking to... his daughter!! Who was the pilot of a geodiving vessel (also made possible by Unobtanium :P )... SEE ABOVE! :D That was a nice interweaving. The whole tunnel thing was very nicely worked out (not that Liu had to do the math himself), but seriously, you can't use something like that to launch spaceships, they just fly straight up and fall down again...

All in all, despite the at times glaring errors that only people like me would notice and care for anyway, this was a superb and truly imaginitive collection of stories. :x

EDIT: Whoopsie, noticed I had left "The Micro-Era" blank, written the plot of that story as "The Devourer", and totally forgotten about the actual Devourer.
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

DAY 2.7

Back into the forward flow. Just two days after that book-heavy Sunday, my mom again was gone most of the day, and I decided to finish off WEEK TWO. Alas, I totally fumbled it, not starting until after she came home, and then getting tired early. Instead of reading three books as planned I did not even finish the second one and had to continue a day later... Anyway, now for Robert Silverberg!

Robert Silverberg - Hawksbill Station: Robert Silverberg's Time Travels #1! This book is based on a novella of the same name. It was written in the late 60s and from that standpoint predicts some boom years followed by a crushing depression. The US political landscape splinters and in '84, not a single party is able to win the electoral college. A new government is created to prevent a total catastrophe, a collaboration of billionaires (...) who manage to get the country out of Depression - but at the same time set up an authoritarian government! Eight years later the first, still rather benign ruler dies and his heir is a real tinpot dictator. Police state, crackdown, destroy the Underground! Yet this oligarchy purports to be more humane than the US before it. Capital punishment is abolished. Instead, the worst, unrepentant political prisoners are stuck in the "Hammer" and sent "down" to the "Anvil" - to Hawksbill station! Which lies a billion years in the past!!!* This trip is one-way, and the time difference is frozen, implying that each year passing in Hawksbill Station also means one year passes "up front." The point of sending them into this distant past is to prevent the time travellers from somehow influencing the future by stepping on the wrong shrew or so. There's ample food but essentially no building materials except for the "care packages" sent through every once in a while.
The main story takes place in Hawksbill Station, told from the perspective of an elderly man in his 60s who was one of the first inmates and became the de facto leader of the prison colony (men only - women are sent somewhere into the Ordovician) - but some months earlier, he had a rock crush one of his feet which had to be amputated. Now he feels like he is losing control. More and more inmates are going insane. Some remain harmless like the guy trying to get in touch with space-time to time-travel by mind (spoiler: he never gets anywhere :P ), but others really go crazy and become violent. Then, after six months of nobody, a young man arrives from, by now, 2029. He claims to be an economist and political activist but he knows almost nothing and is very cagey when asked questions about his future. Instead, he is extremely interested in how the inmates are doing. But to whom is he writing a report if time travels is downslope only?
The second story (and the one new in the novelization) is told in parallel, alternating chapters. Once again we have the protagonist, now 16, in the early '80s, who gets dragged to a meeting of the underground resistance by his very short but very intense friend. Here he also meets a young computer prodigy named Hawksbill who has developed and run a program that predicts that the '84 elections will fail. Viva la Revolucion! Except it fails utterly, see above - and now the underground resistance is REALLY needed. But, again quite predictably, their efforts fail, and one by one is either killed, disappeared or, worse, turns traitor... Hawksbill develops time travel, and the protagonist's friend becomes Torquemada... Until finally, in the early 21st century, the protagonist is caught and sent downslope.
The new arrival indeed is no political prisoner being exiled, but a policeman of a new US government! Not only has the oligarchic dictatorship been overthrown, but two-way time travel has been implemented, and everyone can go home! Except for our protagonist, who comes to the realization that this empty bleakness is his world now.
This book was really fun, one of the best I've read by Silverberg so far.
*In the intro, Silverberg states the original story had it lie two billion years in the past. The main point being it's during the Precambrian, where there's oxygen, abundant sea life, but nothing at all on land. But newer research showed the Precambrian was close in time, so... one billion years?? :-\ More precisely, this is actually set during the Cambrian explosion (trilobites play a minor role) and that was ~540 million years ago...

Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers: Robert Silverberg's Time Travels #2! When I started reading this, it seemed awfully familiar. Some guy having a secret home in the African jungle, teleporting there from near his office? And some research unveiled this was indeed once a short story just title "Hopper" which is published in "Next Stop the Stars", an old short story collection (60 years now! :| ) which I had read as an earlier DAY! And I did not like it at all. :P Well, luckily, the novel expansion was a lot better and pretty much made sense.
So, it's the year 2481 or so, and people are disappearing in droves, hopping into the past to find a better life! The phenomenon of the Hoppers was hardly unknown. The first few showed up in 1981, claiming to have come from the future, from the years 4178 - 4182. Millions of them arrived over the following decades, and in 2106, the phenomenon suddenly stopped. It became mostly forgotten until finally, the Hop years approached. By this time, Earth is vastly overpopulated, and the world government has established a repressive but very stable caste system. Ruled by the two first-tier men, the pyramid goes all the way down beyond twenty to the lowest lowlives. Upward mobility is desired but suppressed, people of a certain tier only interact with people a bit above and below them. What we Germans call "bicycle mentality" ("Kick downward and bow your head upward!") prevails.
CrimeSec Quellen, newly arrived in the seventh tier (and proud but secretive owner of an otherwise unused tier two villa in the nature preserve that is the African continent), gets the job to find the organization sending people into the past. It's clear the phenomenon will come to a stop about a year later, but something must have caused this, right? But upon wasting some thoughts on it, the Government is in a panicked state once they realize that anyone who is actually stopped from travelling back will inevitably change the Now, possibly wiping everything out or at least causing them to lose power. So when Quellen and his co-workers find the file of a guy stupid enough to have given his real name in the past, and find that he will Hop in just a few days (and his profile indicates that he is indeed ready to do so), the race is on to stop Quellen from interfering. But Quellen manages to find the man behind the Hops along an independent route - only to find that this guy knows way too much about his own dark secrets... In the end, rather predictable, Quellen himself hops, all the way into the pre-Colombian past America, where, it seems, he will not just get killed by the first Nations...
This was a quite interesting story about a special flavor of time travel, investigating the consequences of closed timelines and determinism. It was also a nice idea that many a "magician/sorceror" from the ages way before 1980 were Hoppers who specifically asked to be sent to the Dark Ages, Ancient Rome or so.

I had thought of doing the short story collection "To Open The sky" as the third book, but failed totally. In the end, I missed a goal, namely to read 20 books in this week, it's just 19 in total. But I'm still at 45 total.
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

SIXTY BOOKS IN THREE WEEKS!

DAY 3.1

The following Sunday again saw me have a lot of free time - and my stack of short novels is hardly lower. Indeed, I actually managed to find three further Robert Silverberg books which fit my criteria that I had overlooked before!! All had over 200 pages each, but the font size was large, and there was another advantage...

Robert Silverberg - The Silent Invaders/Valley of Time: This was a really short, 140 page novel with a novella glued to the end which, weirdly enough, is not mentioned anywhere on the front or back. For certain reasons, I'll just talk about the book. Earth in some reasonably distant future. Mankind is a space-travelling powerhouse, and only two alien races can rival them, the Daruuii and the Medlins. Soon, a titanic war between Daruuii and Medlin will consume the cosmos, with Earth stuck in the middle! Whoever can get the humans to fight on their side will surely win.
Our protagonist calls himself Abner Harris, he looks human, but is actually a surgically altered Daruuii who infiltrates Earth with the mission to worm his way into government and convince the humans to unite with the Daruuii against the vile, loathsome, utterly despicable pebble-skinned Medlin threat. Little does he realize he is already on the seriously losing side of the equation when he stumbles across a beautiful young human female in his hotel... She turns out to be his Medlin counterpart, and not only that his every move has been anticipated by the Medlins, who are much more numerous on Earth than the ten or so Daruuii. Oh, and not only THAT, it also turns out the Medlin are a peace-loving race while the Daruuii are basically Klingons and all Abner heard about the vile, loathsome, utterly despicable pebble-skinned Medlin is pure propaganda filth. In the end he turns traitor and sees to it that his own race loses before the war even breaks out. A fun, fast-paced book that was a lot more like a little Cold-War spy thriller than a SF story.
The novella was called "Valley Beyond Time" and...

Robert Silverberg - Valley Beyond Time: ... is the first of this four-novella (each ~50 pages long) collection of really vintage 1957 RS material. I actually physically read the version attached to The Silent Invaders, which may have been slightly revised.
Valley Beyond Time: A man pauses, gazing over The Valley, marvelling at how beautiful it is, how perfectly it has sheltered him since he has been here forever. But that... people approaching! Nay, aliens even! He is informed that he has not been here forever, instead, he has just arrived. Soon he remembers, he was in a hyperspace liner travelling toward Earth... The others, too, have been abducted by an entity that calls itself The Watcher. Soon thereafter, the final member of their party (nine in total), an aggressive Aldebaraanian, arrives (same schtick). The Watcher takes care of them, weather is clement and warm, mana literally rains from the heavens... But The Valley is closed off by an invisible dome and mountain ranges, and the inhabitants are just The Watcher's pets!! In the end, in a rather anti-climatic showdown, they defeat The Watcher, who is just some stupid alien, and are returned exactly to where they disappeared. The protagonist had gotten to know an Earth woman and they promise each other they will meet up once he arrives. All in all a fun story.
The Flame and the Hammer: Roman Empire in Space. Far future, thousands of planets suppressed by a suffocating Galactic Empire. Revolution breeds on a world, driven by the promise of a legendary Hammer of Aldryne, a superweapon that will bring the Empire to its knees. It does. Quite boring, weakest of the stories.
The Wages of Death: Best story of the book. Again, distant future, many worlds. On one, a Hitler-like despot who was elected into office has waged a war against the underground resistance. Similar to Hawksbill Station, they are losing hard, and only remnants remain. But these are no hardened guerilla fighters, but a bunch of pansy intellectuals who print pamphlets and rail against tyranny while meeting in shitholes. The protagonist is actually a hulk of a man, but even he is no fighter, just big. He is in contact with the government of a neighboring planet who offer them asylum, but only if they cross 2000 km of hostile land to reach a ship at a spaceport! As they will never make it alone, they hire a brutal, overly practical mercenary to guide them. All goes astonishingly well, until they learn, not a day from their goal, that they are not the first band of dissidents this mercenary has guided... right into the arms of the well-paying secret police! The protagonist overcomes his pacifism, kills the mercenary, gets his comrades to the ship but remains behind, to really start the underground war. One interesting point was that similar to the earlier story, there is something of a Galactic Empire, but here Earth is a benevolent ruler of a loose confederation. But this was still too oppressive for some people, who then elected a politician promising true independence - with the consequence being a brutal police state and dictatorship.
Spacerogue: Conan in Space! Barr Herndon's entire village was wiped out, all of his family killed, when the brutal ruler of the planet, the Seigneur, has his Riders of Doom (or so :P) raze it for shits and giggles. Barr swears eternal revenge, but the Seigneur is well-protected. So Barr bides his time, becomes a spacerogue, joins the trade in hypnotic gems (all through the story, he was Vin Diesel playing Richard B. Riddick for me), gets into the employment of one of the Seigneur's highest aristocrats, fucks that guy's beautiful but lonely wife... Until finally he is granted audience with the Seigneur. But only because his partners in crime signed a treaty with the ruler to share the wealth of the gem smuggling! A spacerogue's code of honor forbids him to attack his employer - while Barr may also not break his oath to kill the Seigneur! Finally he is granted an audience, and then all goes to hell in a handbasket when the Seigneur reveals that he knows exactly which game is being played! The aristocrat then brings out his unfaithful wife in a hanging cage, grills her to death with a laser... Barr, who has had weapons implanted into his body which have passed undetected, kills everyone after putting his love out of her misery, then sentences himself to death for killing his employer by expending his entire life force into the weapon system and bringing the entire palace crashing down on top of himself. Despite being highly predictable and totally ridiculous, this was a lot of fun, and would actually make a pretty cool B-level movie. With Vin Diesel, of course.

Robert Silverberg - Project Pendulum: Robert Silverberg's Time Travels #3! Despite having 230 pages, this book was almost ridiculously short, I read it in just over two hours. Each chapter starts with possibly an empty page (if the previous one ends on the right page), then a short caption containing a name and a time info, then another 1.5 empty pages... And there are a lot of chapters.
In this story, which actually starts in 2016 (no cell phones :P ), two twins undertake a time travel experiment. One is a physicist, the other a paleontologist. They start to "swing" through Time. The first one goes five minutes back (staying in the same spot), the other one five minutes forward. Then the pendulum reverses while the extension with reality extends tenfold: +/- 50 minutes. And so on. Soon, the two leave the well-known lab environment, both temporally (the lab was not yet built/will not be standing anymore) and spatially (there's some kind of slow eastward drift involved). The time they spend in these spatio-temporal locations increases too but is rather unpredictable. One turns up during his childhood years and actually walks to his old home, seeing himself playing in the yard, wondering if he should walk up to the kid and tell him he has to do XYZ to ensure that he gets to travel through time - before realizing he needs to do nothing, as everything has already worked out fine in his Eigenzeitpast. The other lands some dozen years into the future, where a huge celebration is thrown for him. As the time swings become larger, the story diverges in quality. The past travels are quite fun (getting attacked by a group of Neanderthals somewhere in Ice Age Europe - or finally seeing the dinosaurs 100 million years in the past at maximum extension!), the future travels were rather weird. A hippie future where everyone is beautiful and happy but does weird things, an unending series of tunnels created by some hyperpowerful ruling body that traps the time traveller, an almost perfect recreation of childhood in a bubble, and finally... mist, light, infinite power...
An interesting but rather weird aspect concerned the modality of time travel. In contrast to, say, The Time Hoppers, the appearances of the twins in the past were NOT part of the past as they prepared the experiment. But as soon as they slice through the past, they DO become part of the past. So in the initial timeline, no one is sure if this all will work. Then the first twin travels five minutes back, says hi to his colleagues and himself, assuring them that everything is fine, and their future selves will remember this meeting, just as the time traveller himself suddenly forms new memories. But no one will remember the -50 minute meeting until it has happened. This process is not broken until the swing where the one twin decides not to engage his childhood self. In the future, on the other hand, everyone always knows about them, and indeed one of them is expected in the not-too-distant future (2028 or so). All in all, another fun read.

I managed to read all three of these books in one waking period, though not quite within a calendar day. I was rather astonished that in the end, this DAY was even shorter than the one before, all three of them were just 7.X hours of total reading time. Pretty wimpy, if you ask me!
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

Work, work, work. And while I have read quite a lot more, I'm not getting to writing about reading... Still stuck in my vacation in Germany.

So I had launched the third WEEK in late August, but it was clear I'd not get another DAY while at home, and I had a book I needed to finish... But first... While checking through the Robert Silverberg books, I had come across one that looked really interesting, but was a bit too long to become part of a DAY, so I now read it as a standalone.

Robert Silverberg - Across A Billion Years: I'm really too lazy to go looking it up, but some years ago, I had read a short RS novel that featured a group of scientists on a mission, and I was quite amused at their behaviour, since it seemed pretty realistic. This book again featured such a team, and it was great fun to read about them. So, it's the pretty distant future, mankind has spread out several hundred light-years from the Sun in all directions. They seem to have done so in a generally peaceful manner, and have good relations with multiple alien races. I do not have the book with me now to look up their names or so but they were a quite divers group beyond the "could be played by a human in makeup" cliché. You had a small insectile one, another from a race with a weird proclivity to turn themselves more and more into cyborgs the older they got (the oldest just being organic brains in robot bodies), and a huge Brontotherium-like alien which gets totally smashed when it eats flowers. There's an alien which can be male or female depending on a cycle, and another which has completely indeterminate gender. There's a human-built android, over 70 years old, who looks like an 18-year old Valley Girl but is actually not interested in sex AT ALL. There's some middle-aged humans (more on one below) and two human students, the protagonist, Tom Rice, and a girl, Jan. Initially, Tom actually thinks Jan is terribly boring. Of course, that is to change. The two leaders of the expedition are aliens, who have opposing theories and are steadily bickering. The entire story is told from Tom's perspective, in "message cubes" he is writing to his sister. She is quadriplegic and bed-ridden, but part of a telepath network which allows FTL communication across human space, but is hellishly expensive.
So, the plot! While expanding, human- and alien-kind have come across archeological sites bearing artifacts, stuff that is both incredibly durable but also incomprehensible, like weird glowing sticks with alien runic letters on them that move. The race that has created these things are simply called the High Ones, for they have clearly mastered technology far beyond that of any of the races now digging up their stuff. This stuff has been dated to be incredibly old, between 1.05 and 0.8 BILLION years old. And no matter how old within this 250 million year time span, it is exactly the same. This race existed for a quarter of a billion years without any further evolution, because they had already reached perfection.
When it came to the spread of the High Ones, a first serious error cropped up. It is stated they occupied a roughly spherical space about 100 light years in diameter (not centered on Earth, I think) - by now, humanity has expanded much further. Problem is, the stars in any such volume will have dispersed far and wide after a billion years have passed, so realistically, some High Ones sites could be on the other side of the Milky Way...
So here are our "heroes", digging into a mountainside at a very rich site, mostly just discovering glowsticks and other assorted, well-known types of artifacts. But when Tom stumbles across a large, golden glowing sphere several feet in diameter, he, the android Kerry and Mirrick, the rhino alien, go hog wild to unearth it. It turns out to be a kind of holodeck projector, creating a 3D holographic wraparound movie which reveals many incredible things. How the high ones looked like (kind of upright walking insects ten feet high), what their cities looked like (gravity-defying towers hanging from the sky...), and other marvels. They also figure out how to click "next" and access more movies, and come across a zooming star map which points to a cache of artifacts on an asteroid in some system. They blow basically all their budget and have to deal with a terribly hostile telepath woman to get in contact with a university with a powerful computer which is able to puzzle out where the system with the asteroid is located today.
Indeed, Silverberg here does allow some movement of the stars... but then makes the horrible mistake of having them identify multiple naked-eye stars known from Earth's sky in the map. Problem is, almost all of these are naked-eye because they are really bright, quite massive, and short-lived. For sure none would have existed a Gigayear ago...
Anyway, they then get into bureaucratic trouble because the institutions financing them want to have that movie globe. Most of the scientists decide to go renegade and take the globe with them, trying to run ahead of the long arm of the law, to find the treasure trove... and perhaps even the High Ones themselves.
And they do. They manage to find the asteroid, open the door to the chamber - one of the team gets incinerated when it recklessly runs into the chamber and triggers the self-defense net... - and get a huge robot outside. The vastly sentient AI quickly realizes that it can't hear any signals of the Mirt Korp Ahn - which is the name the High Ones give themselves - and is shocked to find how much time has passed. Together with the robot, they manage to find a whole planet entirely covered with a city - think Trantor/Coruscant - which is efficiently run... by nothing but robots! (In another facepalm moment, it's stated a human scout ship had inspected the system but found no habitable planets and left. No idea how it managed to overlook and entire fucking planet covered in artificiality...) Anyway, these robots state they have also not heard from their masters for a long time... 80 million years! Already way closer to now than 800 million! Finally, then, the expedition does find the Mirt Korp Ahn... And the few thousand who are left are completely senile vegetables kept alive artificially by even more robot servants. A truly humbling a dark ending.
All in all, this book was great fun and one of Silverberg's best (well, of those I have read). But it had one scene that made even me raise my eyebrows. It's generally written in a YA style, but this one thing... As Tom, Kerry and Mirrick are excavating the globe, Jan is off to the side, some dozen yards away (and not aware of what's being dug out), and is being accosted by one of the older human team members, who's - oh, the cliché, my eyes are a'roll - a fat, middle-aged nerd who seems to conceive himself to be a lady's man but is actually just a Harvey Weinstein variant. Jan fends him off successfully (call shot to the nuts!), and indeed Tom notices what is going on but a) decides she can take care of herself and b) is way too fascinated by unearthing that globe. Later Jan confronts him and complains he did nothing while she was getting sexually harassed, and he immediately stars spouting bullshit along the lines of "No woman can get raped, she will ether defend herself or she actually wants it." which causes Jan to totally dress him down and go and spend time with the other older dude (who is also rather nerdy - he seriously collects stamps! - but seems a nice guy in general), which delays quite severely the otherwise inevitable "Guy gets girl" which of course has happened by the end. And Mr. Molester? He pretty much gets slowly pushed out of the team and does not accompany them anymore to the asteroid cache - but THAT'S IT! Now I hardly think Silverberg condones rape and harassment - Jan's opinions on the topic had a quite logical and perhaps "modern" ring - but I still wondered why the whole thing was even included in what was otherwise family-friendly entertainment...

Michael Moorcock - Gloriana, or the Unfullfill'd Queen: So, I have mentioned multiple times that I had started another MM book after returning home and finishing The Wandering Earth. This is it. But despite the fact that I all-in-all really liked this book, for some reason it did not really... grip me. I read a bit, put it down, decided to reanimate my DAYS, then read a bit more inbetween, then even read above-mentioned non-DAY novel... and finally was rather hard-pressed to wrap this up at the end of the month!
Anyway, after some rather feebly attempted rape, how about some real rape! This is lauded as one of MM's best books, but also as one of his most controversial. Upon publication, it hardly ruffled feathers, but years later it seems to have been "(re)discovered" by feminists and caused a great outcry, finally leading to Moorcock to write a revised next-to-last chapter. For a while then, that was the only edition on the market. And instead of just looking into the version I had bought in, I think Missouri '06, I just assumed mine was revised, and went ahead and also bought the new MM Collection version which had both versions (with the rapey one restored to its original place). And then it turned out the one I had had before was the 2004 re-revised version which was almost identical. >_> At least the MMC version had some further bonus material in the appendix.
So, all in all, this is a kind of historical fantasy novel. It is appraised as being "darkly erotic" but there was not a lot of that in there, especially compared to some of the alphabet porn MM has produced like A Brothel in Rosenstrasse. The book builds strongly upon Edmund Spencer's "The Faerie Queene", a poem written toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, in which she is Gloriana, ruling over a half-mythical fairyland. Much here is similar, though in this novel, Gloriana's reign occurs a century later.
The titular queen is a spectacular appearance. Great of heighte she was, incredibly voluptuous and splendidly beautiful, kind and wise, a true embodiment of Albion, her realm. But at night, she seeks lust and love, and never reaches fullfillment, even in the vast labyrinthine menagerie of perversions she has had created in her palace's walls, where exotic whores, horny beastmen, little boys and even grunting Neanderthals dwell. Supertall, totally ravishing and incapable of orgasm??? OMG IT'S DIDI IN A PAST LIFE!!!!!
Gloriana finds some surcease in the arms of her confidant and lover, Una, Countess of Scaith, who is of course just another incarnation of Miss Una Persson. and indeed, references to the Multiverse abound. The poet Wheldrake plays a middling role, and the science advisor/alchemist Doctor Dee speaks of many worlds. There are even some travellers of the Moonbeam Roads who show up everyone once in a while, including a certain Adolphus Hiddler, and Austrian who claims that in his world, he has conquered everything... :D
But Gloriana is actually not even the main character. If two can be assigned lead roles, it must be her Lord Chancellor Perion Montfallcon, and his... main Instrument, Captain Quire. Gloriana has reigned for thirteen years now, following in the insane footsteps of her father Hern VI (an even worse version of Henry VIII, and a Targaryen if I ever saw one), who ruled for decades as a mad and bloodthirsty tyrant, raping his 13-year old wife (who then gave birth to Gloriana), then raping Gloriana herself when she turned 13... Montfallcon, together with two other co-conspirators, managed to get Hern to defenestrate himself, and now these three remainders of the ancienne regime do their best to turn Albion into a paradise under mild Gloriana's rule. But, unbeknownst to the peaceful queen, Montfallcon essentially, if a lot more subtly, continues the Terreur against all enemies with the help of his Hound, Captan Quire. Quire is a fantastic antihero, a highly intelligent man with a... certain set of skills and no scruples. He considers himself to be an artist. And when Montfallcon, after a certain failure, disses him to be nothing but a brute servant for brute tasks, Quire absconds, fakes his own death, and disappears into those labyrinthine walls (truly a whole parallel world) to wreak murder and mayhem at court, and send everything to bedlam.
And then, in the end, after many a secret has been revealed and many a character has bled his last upon the stones, Quire performs his coup de grace, and tries to seduce Gloriana to his side. She resists, and he flat out rapes her. :| And to make matters worse, THIS is what she needed, and she finally reaches orgasm under duress... One of the further plotlines were the attempts by multiple other empires and kingdoms to supply Gloriana with a husband (in all cases with the goal of having this King then take the throne away from her), but now she has found bliss in Captain Quire, and he, on the other hand, melts in her arms and swears off his evil ways, and they marry and live happily, well, not quite forever after.
So where DiDi was already shown to respond to Yuki's bondage, the revised/defused version goes the true DiDi route. After finishing the book, I cross-read the revised chapter against the original. The revised expands the rape scene across multiple pages, but in this case DiD... Gloriana is imbued with more strength and overcomes Quire. While at the same time getting very, very aroused. Consensual if rough coupling ensues, and again Quire is "turned" in her arms, and the whole thing ends in orgasmic bliss. The final short ever-after chapter remains the same. But to be honest, this version did feel... rather forced. :P
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Don Alexander
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Re: Books.

Post by Don Alexander »

A new month begins, and the pressure to actually read as much as possible drops away. As I've been browsing my book stacks, I've come across several rather slim short story collections by Ben Bova (one of those SF authors, like Robert Silverberg, where I still have several dozen books floating around waiting to be read), as well as one further book which sounded very interesting. These collections - well, the first two I'd be reading - had some further advantages, see below.

Ben Bova - Future Crime: Ben Bova short stories #1. Something of a meta-collection, made up of stories that had already been published elsewhere. This allowed me to skip quite a large part of the book, as the by far longest tale was City of Darkness, a book I had already read some years back in my 20 books in 1 week action. I started this book on the first of September but did not manage to finish it before going back to Spain, and then my trip was so tiring I only wrapped it up right as the bus was leaving from Malaga airport. So much for taking a total of four books with me just to be on the safe side. :P
Vince's Dragon: Heh, something of a fantasy story. As Bova states, probably the only story ever to deal with a Mafia dragon! :D A young bravo, needing to prove himself to the Don, wants to torch a building, thereby disturbing the invisible dragon lady living within. She shows him how to really torch a building (no evidence of accelerators, the police are really puzzled!), and soon the old Don is replaced by a new Don... A lot of time passes, and young Vince becomes fat old Don Vince, a truly savory dragon meal...
Brillo: Written in cooperation with Harlan Ellison. A cop in the not too distant future gets extremely frustrated when he has to walk the beat with a semi-AI Robocop who adheres to the rules wayyyy too much. In parts funny but also really dark. Brillo, cause, ya know, Metal Fuzz! :P
Out of Time: The Mafia again. An old, dying Don gets the idea to get himself cryogenically frozen until they can heal his body. His brutal, stupid heir, after many a year of crime, gets caught, and comes up with a plan with his lawyer: Have himself also be cryogenically frozen, which will imply he is legally dead - and all charges against him will be dropped! Not to mention by the time he is thawed, all the crimes against him will be past the statute of limitations! The lawyer later has the same idea... but gets thawed after just three years to learn that so many people have been using this trick, the government closed the loophole and now they're all going to be charged!
Test in Orbit: Next to Sam Gunn (see below), another recurring Bova character is Chet Kinsman. While Gunn is like a short Han Solo, Kinsman is more Maverick from Top Gun... Huge ego and the body to wield it. In this story, the Soviets send up some spacecraft of unknown purpose. The Americans test their capability of reacting within less than a day to such an unscheduled launch. While examining the small space station, a Soviet-piloted ship arrives too, and Kinsman is forced to kill the Cosmonaut. For whatever reasons, the Russkies sent up a young woman, terrified to death. Kinsman does not feel like the hero his debriefers make him out to be.
Stars, Won't You Hide Me?: The far future, very compact. A last surviving member of the Human race, which has tyrannized the Universe, flees from the apocalyptic battle against The Others at near light speed. Pursued, he zips around the Universe until it finally collapses in the Big Crunch. You'll never catch me alive!
Diamond Sam: A Sam Gunn tale. Sam is one of Bova's recurring heroes, featuring in a lot of short stories that were collected in two books (Sam Gunn Forever/Unlimited). He is a short, wily NASA astronaut who can be characterized by two words: Han Solo! In this story, he "accidentally" visits a Russian space station, and starts a trade: Porno videos against ice cream spiked with orbitally grown diamonds! He sells the diamonds on the black market and sets up bank accounts for the Russians, sharing the profits. The Russian space station is actually a laser module for "Star Wars", and the diamonds are turned into ultraresistant windows for the laser system. And while it is true the Gunn sells them, and even is totally honest about making the cosmonauts rich later, the diamonds are also analyzed by the Americans to counteract the laser system... This story was interesting as it was told from the perspective of the station commander, many years later, when he is retired in a moon-based old people's home for Heroes of the Soviet Union; at this time Sam Gunn himself is long dead. The second Gunn story I'd be reading - see below - was done in the same style, maybe all of the are?
Escape!: The second longer tale of the volume, also published as a really short standalone book of about 100 pages. A juvenile delinquent lands in an experimental prison facility where everyone is treated well, has a lot of freedom to roam around, the food is good, there's a great library, a school, workshops... The only downside: Your sentence is indefinite, we will let you out once you have become a model citizen. Oh, and escape is utterly impossible, for the prison is controlled by an AI and cameras and sensors are everywhere!

Ben Bova - Escape Plus: Ben Bova short stories #2. This was an easy read - as you may surmise from the title, the main story was Escape!, so I could already skip like 40% of the book. It also contains Vince's Dragon and Stars, Won't You Hide Me? Still, it took me several days in Spain to finish it, way too much to do.
A Slight Miscalculation: A mathematical genius derives a code to predict earthquakes. It predicts that soon, The Big One will happen - something that said genius doesn't really comprehend. He does encounter a mistake, though, between his calculations and those of the computer... Which saves his life, as he is standing on the correct side of a parking lot when everything east of the San Andreas fault slides into the Atlantic. :P He must furiously admit that the computer was correct. So essentially, the whole story just lead up to the punchline of a joke.
The Last Decision: An awesome story! Gordon R. Dickson (the co-author of Gremlins Ho Home!), in his SF, has a character named The Emperor of a Hundred Worlds. Bova loved this background character and got permission to write a story focusing on him. So in this far future, Earth is a tranquil paradise, home to just a few million "baseline" humans, against which the rest of the human race monitors its genetic evolution. But now the Sun is going to explode (oh where have I heard that plotline???) and Earth will be wiped out. But a brilliant young astrophysicist has a plan To Save The Sun!! I write this as a title because, after having this "this seems familiar" thought, I figured out that Bova later, with another coauthor, wrote a complete nearly 1000-page duology (the second book being To Fear The Light) which expands this story to encompass the entire thing!! And, damn it, I have both books but of course was a few days too late to actually take them with me/put them in the big box of books (19 pounds!) which I mailed myself here... :( Anyway, the Emperor actually invites this astrophysicist (Unheard of! A mere commoner from a primitive world far from the Imperial home planet!), has a long talk with her, and decides - his Last Decision, as he is old and dying (interesting: Humans have developed rejuvenation technology, but the immediate Imperial family is forbidden to use it - there are advantages to having your Emperor be mortal and "short-lived"...) - to send the entire Imperial court to live on Earth, including his ambitious son! This will guarantee that all the other worlds will fall in line to finance the project which will take centuries and eat up vast resources. So, yeah, REALLY looking forward to the two full books.
Men of Good Will: Another really short tale that is essentially a joke. A reporter wants to know why, among rising tensions between the USA and the USSR, the two moonbases of the superpowers seem to have cordial relations. Well, turns out they initially had their own spats with live ammunition, but the weak gravity of the Moon and lack of any air resistance led to all the bullets encircling the entire Moon and hitting the bases again and again... OK, this was a rather stupid idea, after all, despite lack of air resistance, hitting buildings is for sure going to stop the barrage at once...
Blood of Tyrants: An alt-universe Danny Romano, the protagonist of Escape!, who, in this case, has not been rehabilitated, plans to take over the entire city in a bloody revolution so that the youth gangs have free hand to do whichever way the please. Things don't end well...
The Next Logical Step: The US devises an extremely powerful computer system which combines mind-blowing VR capabilities with a predictive engine, creating fully immersive movies of how certain confrontation scenarios with the USSR will play out. Problem is, no matter the input, each scenario ends in nuclear holocaust and the end of civilization. What to make of this? See to it that the plans for this system are leaked to the Soviets STAT! :D
The Shining Ones: A kid, who is suffering from some unstated but lethal condition (it's told from his perspective and he just heard his parents talking with a doctor when they thought he was not listening), is given hope when an alien spaceship lands near his home! Similar to the movie Arrival, the ship is immediately cordoned off by the Armed Forces, who try, but fail to communicate with the aliens. The kid sneaks into the camp in hopes of getting on the ship to be healed. He gets caught hiding, but by a linguist - yeah, really reminds me of Arrival! - who decides showing the aliens a sick child might just work. And indeed, the kid gets let into the spaceship, where he is able to communicate with the aliens. They deny him healing, but offside mention that while he was teleported into the inside, they "fixed several chemical imbalances in his body" - which is exactly what he desired! Also, the reason the aliens landed on Earth and refused to communicate with anyone is that their arrival was just a stupid navigation error and they were getting their bearings in the hyperdimensional space-time fabric...
Sword Play: A short, rather amusing totally non-SF tale based on an experience Bova had in his fencing club when younger. A total novice, who just came over to see what it's like, is invited to fight against his more experienced friend. He accidentally hurts him (comes too close, the epée bends and breaks and stabs the other guy), and while the wound doesn't look so bad, the young man mentions that he has got blood in his mouth. The fencing teacher panics (punctured lung!) and drags him to the ER, where a highly annoyed doctor complains the guy has nothing but a scratch! Turns out he was not lying, but he had just bit his tongue...
A Long Way Back: Bova's very first published SF story. Emphasis on both published and SF. Apocalypse has come to the world. A bunch of scientists manage to band together in the wasteland, scrounge a bunch of parts, and build a rocket to send a man to orbit. For up there, launched shortly before the apocalypse, are the parts of a solar power satellite which just need to be put together like LEGO. In doing so, the astronaut gives the satellite a slight acceleration, which implies it will not point its microwave beam at the receiver anymore... :( This man, back on Earth, had urged the others to man an expedition into the other cities of the continental US. The leader of the scientists was opposed. They finally agreed: Dude becomes astronaut, builds satellite, gets his expedition when he comes back. But now all seems lost. After some thought, the astronaut sacrifices himself, using the fuel meant for de-orbit to nudge the satellite back into position... nearly! The beam will actually hit a few hundred miles from where the scientists have built their fortress, forcing them out into the world and out of the stagnation they had landed themselves in. Really good story especially considering how old it is.

Ben Bova - Prometheans: Ben Bova short stories #3! This volume is a mix of SF and non-fiction stories dealing with that part of humanity Bova labels the Prometheans (in contrast to the Luddites): Those who bring the fire, stoke the fire, and generally create advancement and progress. At times through strictly scientific means, at other times, in more adventuresome ways... None of these stories showed up in the other two books.
Sam Gunn: Well, here's Sam Gunn again! The first, but also last, Sam Gunn story! Because, alas, he is dead! :| Again! But while preparing his burial monument out in the vastness of Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, an old hand tells the tale of how he was once part of the second wave of Lunar exploration, and Sam saved the life of all the astronauts after their return spacecraft had run out of battery power while sitting on the surface... by MacGyvering a still to produce non-lethal (but otherwise horrible) hard alcohol to keep everyone inebriated for a week until rescue could get there! :D Also, the monument was built far from any moonbases to ensure people would be paying guides to go out beyond the horizon and see it!
Private Enterprise Goes Into Orbit: An article actually published in the in-flight magazine of Continental Airlines in the hopes of businesspeople reading it... From 1983, and highly optimistic at the time, predicting orbital hotels by 1999 or a fifth space shuttle for purely commercial flights. I looked up some of the companies mentioned, one pretty much failed and now offers "star naming services and space burials" and one I was unable to find at all...
Vision: Frustrated at having a talk show hogged by an UFOlogist and a mystic, a NASA engineer blurts out on TV that you can live forever in orbit. After that, there's no way back, congress funds its own geriatric retirement home up there.
Meteorites: Well, just that, an article on the things.
Zero Gee: Another Chet Kinsman story. This was a rather sexist story about Kinsman flying to a small space station with a ravishing female magazine photographer - and a decidedly plain-Jill chaperone astronaut... The story took a nice twist when it turns out the photographer is damaged goods and will only have sex for babies (none yet) or business - not pleasure! I was actually hoping Kinsman would end up with the other woman, but no doing... In the end, he does have sex with the photographer - which is then totally glossed over as well. *annoyed* At least she blows him off after landing, leaving him alone and frustrated.
Living And Loving In Zero Gravity: An article for Playboy. ;) Which then did not have terribly much to say about the Loving part after all.
A Small Kindness: Interesting story that Robert Silverberg would have later turned into an entire novel. ;) Felt rather... racist, though. The Cold War is over and a World Government has replaced the rule of nation states. But alas, it's not NWO or the Rothschilds who have taken over the Earth, but the Third World, and now they are ruining the West! Reverse colonialism! A man who lost his family in riots during the transition has turned assassin, and has set out to kill the "Black Saint", the leader of the Tanzanian delegation who is a kind of Ghandi/Mandela type. Too bad he turns out to be a godlike alien who is trying to get humanity to not wipe itself out...
Galactic Geopolitics: A factual article dealing mostly with how alien races would interact with us, as well as stellar evolution. Hints at the Galactic habitable zone without naming it. It's from 1973 and therefore has some "facts" that are completely wrong... Bova mentions that two of the five nearest stars have a planet each, without naming them. Alas, all those "planets" from back then were false positives. Also, he asserts again and again that primordial gas from the Big Bang might be pure hydrogen or admixed with helium - no! This stuff is very well mixed and pristine gas is always hydrogen+helium.
Priorities: The shortest story at just four pages. An astrophysicist is aghast at being told there's no money in the budget of the US to explore extrasolar planets which have been shown to harbor intelligent races. In the final paragraph, a blue-maned alien on one of those planets is aghast that the priests have forbidden further studies of the same planets (but now including Earth) - hoping the other races are not so stupid...
SETI: Non-fiction introduction to the topic from an early perspective. I'm certainly glad William Proxmire is not around anymore...
The Great Supersonic Zeppelin Race: Allegedly, it is possible to build a supersonic aircraft without a sonic boom, but the wing design involved produces no lift! So people (from Avco Everett, Bova used to work for this company) try to build a supersonic zeppelin! :D This was definitely a satire, with scientists named Pencilbeam, ecologists named Sequoia, and a Soviet minister of transportation named Traktor... When the project does not work out in the end, they instead come up with... the Hyperloop! :| (let's see how THAT project comes out...)
Blessed Be The Peacemakers: A short piece on the "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile program and the risks and rewards it entails. I strongly assume this was later turned into an entire book, "Star Peace: Assured Survival", a book that became obsolete pretty quickly...
The Weathermakers: There's an entire novel of the same name which I also own, likely based on this 30-page story. Project THUNDER has been developed to kill hurricanes, by preventing them from truly forming by equalizing the temperature differences in tropical depressions that drive the heat engine. But when four such depressions/storms form in a chain, the relatively small project team faces a conundrum. They decide to dissipate the westernmost one (already in the Caribbean and near hurricane strength), and #3 and #4, which are still easy prey in the eastern Atlantic. But #2 then develops into a superpowerful hurricane they dub Omega, and it's heading straight for Washington!!! Despite being forbidden any action, the team starts doing actual weather control, shifting the position of a high-pressure area and even putting a kink into the jet stream to deflect the hurricane to the northeast and out into the cold Atlantic. I can't check, but I assume this short story will show up very similar in the book, as the opener - and then the real fun (and calamity) begins! Lots of fun and again, I feel the urge to read the book now...
Man Changes the Weather: The most interesting of the non-fiction articles. I know quite a bit about the early days of SETI but this one contained a lot of stuff I had never heard about. It was written in 1973 and was quite (over)optimistic, and interestingly even in the intro, written over a decade later, Bova laments that not much more has happened. And today? Is anyone talking about modifying or controlling the weather?? Hell, we have European vs. American predictions of hurricane paths, despite computer power jumping many orders of magnitude compared to 1973... :P (Go, European models, go!)
The Man Who...: Definitely the best story of the book. A young, pretty reporter from a glossy magazine is assigned to cover a "dark horse" presidential candidate, a senator from Montana. Right from the onset, she thinks she might have a juicy story, as he is visiting a medical lab. But nope, no cancer, he's just fine. And impressive. Over the following months of being "embedded", she falls in love with him, and he with her - or so it seems. Because at times, he can be friendly, but otherwise cold and unemotional toward her. She leaves the magazine, joins his staff and is dragged upward in his meteoric rise - until, shortly before the convention where he will be elected his party's presidential candidate, she finds out that he has spent a total of 16 hours on the phone with different policy experts while at the same time being mostly in her vicinity - all in a 7-hour period... She flies across the country to the lab where she met him first, and meets him again - the "warm" him!! He then tells her that he and the leader of this lab have created six further identical clones, each of whom have become experts in certain policy fields. Juggling them around so that only one was visible at any given time, they created the illusion of the perfect, all-knowing, ever-energetic candidate. The last paragraph of the story is chilling. Of course, they had to keep the reporter in the lab "until after the inauguration." Now she tells us that they are treating her very well, but maybe... have they been putting things in her food? After all, she's pretty sure his second inauguration is coming up... Or is it the third? I have to admit I could not figure out the story's title, though.
The Seeds of Tomorrow: Musings on the history of science. Seems to be an excerpt from a book SO obscure that while it is listed on Goodreads, it has zero ratings, reviews, reads... And not even a cover picture. WTF?

All in all, these were three fun books. A few really awesome pieces, a few decidedly lackluster ones, most in the "good but not spectacular" realm. Which is, in my opinion, the general descriptor for Bova, I don't think I've read anything five-star from him yet, but also little three-star and below. Solid.

It took me far longer to wrap up Prometheans than anticipated - my second weekend after returning to Spain was a long one, with a holiday on Friday, but I did not finish the book until ten minutes after midnight on Sunday morning... :|
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