Archive for October 2012
Happy Halloween!
Posted on: October 31, 2012
Geeky Halloween fun!
geeky pumpkin carving FOR THE WIN!
Some just plain weird Halloween costumes. also, Carl Sagan, which is awesome!
BoingBoing’s open thread for DIY Halloween fun. There are some f’ing brilliant photos in the comments.
What will I be doing at 8pm Wednesday night? watching Charlie Brown, of course!
The Pinterest Halloween feed. You’re welcome.
whatcha gonna do with that pumpkin? Roast the seeds and make pie of course! the best pumpkin pie recipe I’ve found, so far.
When you get back from that Pinterest feed, I’ve a cheesy but true Halloween story for you.
Cordelia’s Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold
published in 1999
where I got it: borrowed from a friend
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I don’t usually go for these ultra long series, I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to track down every single book and read them in a specific order. Ahh, but if the books can be read in nearly any order (Vlad Taltos, Discworld, Culture, I’m staring at you!), and if a friend offers to lend me the first few books in the internal chronology, how could I say no? Thus, my start of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series is begun.
Cordelia’s Honor is comprised of the short novels Shards of Honor, and Barrayar, which are the chronological beginning of McMaster Bujold’s famous Vorkosigan series. I read them as one long novel, and what better way to get introduced to the series’ titular character, Miles Vorkosigan, than to meet his parents first?
Cordelia Naismith is captain of a Betan scientific mission. She mostly keeps her crew focused on what they are doing and out of trouble. Attacked on a planet, she becomes the prisoner of Aral Vorkosigan, heir to a noble family on the planet Barrayar. Recently out of it’s “time of Isolation”, Barrayar is the complete opposite of Beta Colony. Where the Betans are known as an egalitarian society, Barrayar is steeped in male dominance. The Betans live lives of ease, with access to the best medical technology and mental health services, whereas on Barrayar women still die in childbirth and mental illness or physical ailments are seen as incurable and exploitable defects.
Aral Vorkosigan is Cordelia’s social opposite, but they believe in the same things – respect, dignity, honor, doing the right thing at all times. I can’t say there wasn’t any Stockholm Syndrome going on here, but when Cordelia is eventually able to return to her homeworld, she learns she’s changed too much to be welcomed home. One thing leads to another, and the only safe place for her is the path that continues her relationship with Aral Vorkosigan.
Cordelia’s Honor is incredibly dense. McMaster Bujold crams about 1200 pages of plot and characterization into a few hundred pages, showing us, through Cordelia’s eyes, the corrupted royal house of Barrayar, it’s bloodthirsty noble families, and Cordelia and Aral’s attempts at a normal life. She’s a foreigner, he’s the guardian to the young Emperor. The one thing they can never have is a normal life. McMaster Bujold is most definitely following that time honored philosophy of coming up with the worst possible things an author can do to their characters, and then doing it, again and again, in ever more tragic and horrific ways, keeping the reader turning pages and biting nails.
Sudden, Broken and Unexpected (novella) by Steven Popkes
December issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction
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Can music be broken down into ones and zeroes, bits and micro-bits? Can music be written by an AI?
possibly. sort of. maybe?
Which leads to questions of how would one program and AI to pass a musical Turing Test, where the music written by the AI is indistinguishable from the creative musical abilities of a human? Is such a thing possible? and if it were, how would the music loving public react?
In Steven Popkes latest short story, Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected, he takes the above and slowly turns it inside out, in the process creating a highly impactful story.
The story opens with musician Jake Mulcahey taking a job to revise and rewrite some fairly generic pop music. In his youth, Jake had gone on the road with his band as they chased the fame of their sole hit single. Jake is still haunted by his bad decisions, the fact that he is the reason the band broke up. Since then, he’s put out a few studio albums, and stays mostly behind the scenes in the music industry.
Besides, who would want to see an oldster like Jake on stage playing guitar, when instead they could pay to see a holographic Divaloid? Even better, Divaloids can be downloaded into your own home. They aren’t people, they are licensing and programming. There isn’t anything a Divaloid can’t or won’t do to please a fan. That’ll start to get creepy once that thought sinks into your brain, and it’s supposed to.
Guest post on Urban Fantasy
Posted on: October 24, 2012
I have a guest post over at Bastard Books today, and we’re talking Urban Fantasy. Or, to be more specific, why most UF turns me off. There’s already some interesting conversations going on the comments.
leave it to Bastard to get me to lay my soul bare.
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snarky snippet:
So much of the urban fantasy I see when I go to Barnes and Noble these days seems like a fashion spread for really tight pants, anorexia, and neat tattoos. A stupid reason to be sure, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the cover art on a lot of these books is a major turn off to me. Judging a book by the cover? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. . .
Read the rest here!
baby’s first e-book
Posted on: October 20, 2012
as a surprise, a very good friend of mine lent me her kindle, preloaded with a few anthologies I’m interested in, and two Neal Asher novels, which I was very interested in. She certainly knew how to tease me.
Change, to mis-quote Agent Smith, is inevitable.
After a few days of staring at the thing, I decided I better pick it up and start using it. What if I couldn’t figure out how it worked? what if I broke it (Don’t worry E, it’s perfectly safe!)? GULP, what if I liked it, and had all this time been a super-hypocrite of e-readers??
Here’s goes nuthin’, right?
Granted, I have read PDFs of books before, but they were usually exactly that – a PDF of the printed version, complete with page numbers at the bottom, identifiers at the top, chapter page breaks, etc. On the screen it looked exactly like the page of a book, and if I printed it out, it looked like I’d photocopied a page out of the printed book.
but these true e-books? these are interesting beasts. I feel like a scifi character on a mission of first contact. Will I be able to communicate with the alien? will their technology dwarf mine? how does their language and syntax compare to what I’m used to?
Some nice surprises that I liked about the Kindle, and the e-book experience:
The skinnyness of the thing is very nice. It nestles perfectly in my purse, and I feel very sophisticated reading from it during lunchtime at work. It also has a super durable leather cover, offering a little bit of tactile interaction, and a lot of protection. I’m not a klutz, but a little extra protection on an expensive electronic gizmo is always a plus.
The buttons and menus are very intuitive. it holds a battery charge a long time, and even better it uses the same universal charger as my cell phone. It took me less than 5 minutes of messing with the thing to figure out the basic menu options, how to tell how much battery was left, etc. Intuitiveness is a big plus for non-techies like me.
And the things that shouldn’t have been a surprise, but were:
The Skinner, by Neal Asher
Posted on: October 17, 2012
- In: Neal Asher
- 9 Comments
The Skinner, by Neal Asher
published in 2005
where I got it: borrowed from a friend
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So often in science fiction, immortality is found through technological means – we upload, or become cyborg, or some such. How refreshing to come across a biological method of immortality in Neal Asher’s The Skinner, and that’s just the first of many refreshing concepts presented in this unique space opera.
Discovered around a thousand years ago, the planet known as Spatterjay is unique in the universe. The environs of the planet are so harsh and the poisons coursing through the bodies of its indigenous species so volatile that every life form on the planet has evolved to survive. Nearly every life form on the planet is teeming with a native virus, that for all intents and purposes, makes its victims immortal. On Spatterjay, the most valuable commodity is permanent death.
If you could survive any injury, how would it change how your life? To the citizens of Spatterjay, decapitation puts a crimp in one’s afternoon, not one’s life. Those with a weak stomach may want to skip The Skinner, as Asher has quite a bit of magnificently disgusting fun putting characters through the physical ringer.
The story begins with the arrival of three off-worlders. The depressed yet curious Erlin who is searching for a famous ship captain who keeps a monster’s head in his sea chest; Keech, the cyborg corpse cop who has a score to settle with the remaining pirates who were involved with enslaving the citizens of Spatterjay; and Janer, who tries to convince every one he’s a simple tourist employed by a hive mind. And circling high above them all are the snarky subminds of the Artificial Intelligence who manages the government of Spatterjay. And we can’t forget the semi-intelligent long-necked large-winged living Sails, who are an integral part of the fishing industry on Spatterjay. If you read The Skinner for no other reason, read it for the Sails.
An Evil Guest, by Gene Wolfe
published in 2008
where I got it: purchased new
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Struggling actress Cassie Casey has just met the man of her dreams. Well, men, actually. First she meets handsome Gideon Chase, who hires her to help him spy on the mysterious and wealthy Bill Reis. In return for her help, Gideon will make Cassie a star of stage and screen. When Cassie eventually meets Bill, she instantly dislikes him, more-so as he showers her with attention and expensive gifts.
An Evil Guest is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. As expected with a Wolfe, we are given some vague hints early on – the story takes place in the future, Gideon might be working for the Government, we’ve met another intelligent race on another planet and in some areas (but not all), their science is ahead of ours, but in general life seems to be going on as normal on planet Earth.
The story is told nearly one hundred percent through dialog, conversations between Cassie and either Gideon or Bill Reis, conversations between Cassie and the other members of the theatre company. Entire chapters are nothing by dialog. The scenery, the world building, it’s all very shadowy. At times I felt like I was listening to a radio play, where the sound effects for a thunderstorm are made with a rain stick and a thin sheet of metal.
Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross
published in 2003
where I got it: borrowed
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I used to read a ton of Charles Stross, I couldn’t get enough of the guy. Over a few years I managed to burn myself out, and recently I’ve really gotten back into him with his Laundry series. And then I realized, I’ve never read the man’s Hugo nominated debut novel, Singularity Sky.
First off, what the heck is a singularity, and why should you care? It’s important to know, if you’re interested in understanding the importance of Stross’s singularity themed science fiction. Broadly defined, a singularity is when the rate of change reaches infinity, it’s the event horizon, the moment when artificial intelligence reaches beyond human comprehension.Those graphs that show a curved line going up and up and up? when that line is perfectly vertical, that’s the singularity. When computers and nanomachines and AIs are crunching information at a speed that’s faster than we can measure, that’s singularity. Some folks are pretty freaked out about the idea of computational ability being stronger, larger, and faster than the combination of all the human brains on the planet, and Stross? He’s the guy dancing on the razor edge of the event horizon.
Singularity Sky takes place in the aftermath of a singularity event which caused humanity to be scattered among the stars. Martin Springfield, an engineer from Earth, has been dispatched to an out of the way star system called The Republic. Overly aristocratic and trapped in their neo-luddite ways, the common people of The Republic are ripe for revolution, and in fact, a small rebellion in a little colony on Rochard’s World has already begun, thanks to an entity that calls itself The Festival.
How hard do you want it?
Posted on: October 4, 2012
or, random thoughts on hard science fiction.
How hard is too hard? How much science do you really want in your science fiction? According to wikipedia, hard scifi is defined as
“a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both.”
It goes on to say that hard scifi should have accurate science and lots of scientific details. To simplify greatly, in hard scifi the science is an important part of the worldbuilding. the soft scifi story says they boarded a ship and went to another planet, the hard scifi story offers information regarding the type and design of the ship, how it manages to travel faster than light, and what it’s fuel is made of, and all of these details are important to plot development and characterization.
I’ve always had a soft spot for hard scifi because I love knowing how things work. Doesn’t matter if the author mentions elements or fuels or technology that doesn’t currently exist (that’s the fiction part), because I’m still getting a plausable scientific foundation for the technologies mentioned. Many books that I’d categorize as hard scifi can easily fall into other categories as well – space opera, military scifi, first contact, etc.
Titles that come to mind when I think hard scifi include Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, Faith, by John Love, Clockwork Rocket, by Greg Egan, and plenty of Peter Watts, Gregory Benford, Larry Niven and A.E. Van Vogt. It’s the type of stuff where accurate science trumps all, and it’s usually pretty damn awesome.
as readers and fans of hard scifi, how hard do we really want it?
I bring this up because I recently survived Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan. Egan is a bit of a mystery man, and this was my first taste of his style. Egan dumps his reader on an alien planet (sounds good so far!), and the story mostly follows a scientist who learns of the danger her planet is it (still sounds great!). The physics work a little different in this solar system (sweet!) so we get all sorts of charts (cool, i guess) and academic discussions (when did I sign up for SCI302 Astrophysics II?) about the physics and how basically time and light and spacetime is completely different here. And then there are more charts, to put everything in 4 dimensions, more academic discussions (when did I sign up for SCI515 Non-real Relativity??), and then, well, I started to feel a bit stupid. What happened to the cool aliens and interesting plot?
If the heavy science in the book bores me to tears, can I still call myself a fan of hard scifi?
I freely admit I’m not the smartest person in the world, I’ve always loved math and science, even if it didn’t love me back. But when a hard scifi book makes me feel like I flunked 10th grade geometry, the hard scifi just got too hard for me.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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