Further Assimilations

I'm curiously drawn to re-interpretations in modern fiction of the underpinnings of Christian theology, such as the one in the beginning of Tolkien's Silmarillion. Since I've enjoyed Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, I picked up To Reign In Hell at a con or bookstore, and gave it a read.

Well, I tried to. Twice. The first couple of times, for some reason I couldn't get a sense of the characters or the premise. Last night, I took a deep breath, and tried a third time with much more focused attention, getting much farther into it. The attempt didn't work out...

( Spoiler-laden discussion )

I still say the Taltos novels are pretty good, and maybe I'll pick up the next one in line, soon, as a palate cleanser. And the first sentence of this post sure is pleased with itself.

Since my 'Net connection is still wonky, I may be reduced to watching this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special on SciFi. The horror.

On the other hand, I received a nice Who fandom Xmas present in the from of this Livejournal artwork post by _tonylee_. The image linked at the bottom cheered me greatly; the likenesses are a bit off, but it's still my desktop wallpaper for a while. (One of them. The other wallpaper is the Apollo 8 "Earthrise" shot right now.)

As Starr works tonight and tomorrow, we finished the majority of our own gift-giving last night. Among other things, I received two hardcovers: an H.P. Lovecraft collection, and a Hitchhiker's omnibus of all five novels and the short story. In each case, these will supersede paperbacks already on my shelf, thus retaining the integrity of the Stuff Reduction Plan. Starr, on the other hand, got a gift card for plenty of crochet yarn, and a brand-new toolbelt to aid in her remodeling projects (she's already done a den and a bathroom). She wore the toolbelt around all evening to 'break it in', so I think it was appreciated.

I am messing with my co-workers today, playing Mannheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra with album breaks provided by cuts from the "Sailor Moon SuperS Christmas For You" album.

I had a good, if exhausting, birthday weekend.

Starr bought me the delivery pizza I like (which we don't get often, because they don't have much that she likes) and a couple of this year's Trek ornaments for our Xmas tree. Some new clothes and a Barnes & Noble card rounded out my birthday. I confess that I'd rather be 30 than 40, but I'd rather be 40 than dead. Besides, my life doesn't exactly suck right now. 40 ain't so bad. Thanks much to the people who wished me Happy Birthday on the last entry! My friends absolutely rock, and I'm fortunate to have folks like you in my life. *group hug*

Of course, we also moved furniture and unpacked stuff at the house, and made another run to the apartment. The front room's full of empty packing boxes and stuff to be Freecycled, and the kitchen and full bath are just about clear; we still have the half bath and the bedrooms to do, though all three bedrooms are at least partially done. I had hoped to clear them this weekend, but that turned out to be unreasonable. We'll work on them this week instead.

However, because of the dust we kicked up and the wacky weather, I was sneezing furiously all weekend - I know it was driving Starr crazy. I had to take two Benadryl before bed to ensure that I could breathe all night; it worked, and I got a good night's sleep, but man, I'm still feeling those Benadryl this morning.

I think the book meme is evolving - I could swear that this is a different list than I saw earlier this week.

Bold those books you have read.
Italicize those books you intend to read.
Underline those books you love.

Post the list in your own LJ. ( Behind a cut for good manners. )

26 of 'em, not too bad from what I hear.

Found Iron Chef Japan on the Fine Living Network. Now I need only suffer through the occasional Martha Stewart commercial to get my fix. Sadly, NBC / Universal came down on them about the Backdraft music, and the whole show's been re-scored by someone who didn't really get it; but it's better than nothing.

There's a tire fire in North Carolina this week, and the smoke's traveled all the way up here. The air in Portsmouth is nasty. I feel like someone in a cyberpunk book who should be walking the city streets with a small respirator. Sucks, because otherwise the heat's much more tolerable today.

Thank goodness for the Baen Free Library and the Baen CDs. Because of those resources, I didn't pay any money for John Ringo's The Hero. Now, I enjoyed his first "Posleen" books well enough, though the ending of the war was unsatisfying; but this book pretends to be one story for 100 pages (!) and then, without warning, changes its mind, abandons nearly everything, and becomes a completely different story.

Imagine you're watching the second Trek movie, getting into the story, and the first face-off between Kirk and Khan has just ended. Suddenly, a renegade cadet from the Enterprise steals the Genesis Device plans, uses the prefix codes to cause warp core breaches and destroy both ships, and hides in the Mutara Nebula in a 72-hour survival spacesuit to wait for an arranged Romulan pickup. Unknown to him, one of Khan's men got out in a similar spacesuit, and is hunting him down as the only chance for survival.

While the "hunting each other down" part of the movie might be gripping, I assume most people's reaction would be, "WTF? What happened to the plot I was just watching? Who are these people? I don't even like these people." That was my reaction to this book. Ah, well, it's not like I don't have lots more to read, including In The Serpent's Coils, Grave Peril, and Little Brother (yes, it's a free download).

Oh, and while I'm reviewing things, have I mentioned that I am now quite the Steven Moffat fan? The ending of "Forest of the Dead" had me saying to myself, "Bit of a downer, but everything lined up properly, lotsa neat stuff, some good lines. Good episode." Then: ( Non-specific Spoiler ) Well done indeed.

Speaking of which, the reason there's not going to be much 2009 Who is that David Tennant will be playing Hamlet on stage that year, which I'd love to see. Here is Neil Gaiman writing Tennant's Tenth Doctor as Hamlet:

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"

I'd so watch that.

The other day Starr picked up a book for me, one that I've been meaning to read for years: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle In the Dark. I'm enjoying it, but he's preaching to the choir, and I've not yet gained any new insights from the book. On the other hand, I also finally have a copy of tltrent's In the Serpent's Coils waiting in line, and I'm looking forward to reading that one. In my opinion, "Young Adult" fantasy and science fiction is where much of the good stuff is happening right now. Say what you want about Harry Potter, but Sorcerer's Stone was a better read than many of the transcribed D&D adventures that pass for fantasy novels these days.

Speaking of transcribed D&D, Gary Gygax's recent death caused me to drag out some of the old adventures I'd saved since the mists of First Edition, with an eye to running them again. In particular, I'm looking at the old S-series: "Tomb of Horrors", "White Plume Mountain", and "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" (a particular favorite).

Now, I know these were convention tournament modules, but I was struck by the lack of role-playing, or even much of a plot besides "collect loot and survive to the end". The adventures are full of unfair puzzles, insta-deaths, and places where the GM will have to do some blatant railroading if the party's not going to wipe (no running back from the graveyard to rez!)

If I were to run them now, and the basic concepts are juicy enough to make the idea interesting, I'd have to do some major re-writing for my audience. I'd want map revisions, monster changes, and some serious story integration. It wouldn't be a trivial task, even discounting the problem that the adventures were designed for experienced First Edition AD&D characters. What game system do I want to use - a D&D version, Earthdawn, Herc & Xena, an alternate-universe Shadowrun? (And in most of those cases, which edition?)

Yeah. This is kinda turning into a campaign, which is too bad; I'm not sure I can spare the time right now, fun as it sounds. The urge to run "Barrier Peaks" near Roswell using the Deadlands setting may have to wait.

Addendum: The sentence "the chest contains 10,000 gold pieces" was obviously written by someone who had never counted out 10,000 quarters, say, and then tried to carry them around for any length of time.

After starting the series 6 years ago, I finally picked up the last two volumes and have finished reading the Chobits comic. I liked it a lot, and I'm glad I gritted my teeth to read eight graphic novels backwards. (I usually take in an entire comic page in a glance or two, and reading unflipped manga for me is a bit like taking your car up to 55 mph in second gear. You can do it, but it's not comfortable.)

Y'know, only the Japanese could combine 1) a serious examination of computer emotion and sentience, and 2) innocent, adorable robot girls running around unself-consciously in mildly fetishy outfits. It kept confusing me, because between the clothing choices and the male lead's humorous over-reactions to every situation, I wasn't sure I was meant to be taking this seriously, but then the authors would drop back into the real distress experienced by several characters because of the difficult emotional situations they faced.

The ending doesn't contain any real surprises, but the purpose of this tale is the journey, not the destination, and the last book makes sense of several points that I'd expected to be conveniently forgotten. I no longer trust 21st century creators to do this, so it's a welcome change to be able to believe "we were planning this all along" for once.

In completely unrelated news, Midori has found the basket of laundry that I've just pulled from the dryer, and is at this moment the happiest sleeping cat in Portsmouth.

Now that I have cleared out some books, and indeed started another stack to go, I feel less guilty about picking up a few more.

Reading right now:
Storm Front, by Jim Butcher
A little something madwriter suggested to me

Wanting to pick up ASAP:
In the Serpent's Coils, by Tiffany Trent
Benighted, by Kit Whitfield
Wizards at War, by Diane Duane
The Sagan Diary, by John Scalzi
The Empty Chair, by Diane Duane

I've had books 2 and 3 of Butcher's Dresden Files for over a year. Now that I have book 1, I feel I can finally start reading through, though after all these years I've finally learned to break up reading a series with other books by other authors. Having met Tiffany two Technicons ago, I figure it's high time to read Coils; and cjmr knows why I'm planning to read Benighted. With A Wizard of Mars coming out, I need to catch up on my Young Wizards; and I can finally wrap up the story of my favorite literary Romulan Commander with Empty Chair (out for over a year, and I somehow never noticed).

I'll save comments on madwriter's offering for some other entry sometime :)

More thoughts: I'm not sure I've bought many new books over the last year. Most of these have been on the shelves for a while. I think I needed to convince myself that it was okay to spend the money again, as long as I don't let my living space collapse under the accumulated weight. Also, I'm pleased about how many of these authors I've gotten to speak to, even briefly and electronically. I love the 21st century. Lastly, I'm depressed by the difficulty of finding a science book section in B.Dalton's or Waldenbooks. It's not like I can't get the individual books I'm interested in from Amazon or have Jesse down here order them for me, but I wish I lived in a country that wanted to read about science.

I had every intention of heading over to the MarsCon Badge Assembly Party last night, but the world caught up with me and I ended up insensate on the couch for most of the evening, with both knees screaming of inflammation. It was something like a milder version of the saying "A sucking chest wound is life's way of telling you to slow down a bit."

If I don't take it a bit easy this week, there will be little point in going at all; MarsCon is not the sort of SF convention where one wants to hit their energy limits at 9:30pm. I'm still kind of annoyed with myself for conking out at 1:30 at New Year's.

Happily, I found geckoman and big_danny_t at the concert on Sunday, and learned that Gecko is chairing next year. He has some great plans for the con - I hope that even a few of them work out.

In unrelated trivia, I heard this morning about a funeral parlour which is making plans to warm the building with the waste heat produced by the crematorium. I was immediately reminded of the Fremen of Dune, who are driven to such severe water-conservation necessities that they extract the water from their dead to return to the public supply. I can't seem to decide whether the parlour's plan is logical or nauseating. (I suppose neither reaction is exclusive.)

I finished Harry Potter 7 on Monday. You'll find no spoilers in this entry - I'll just say I found the book satisfiying, and leave it at that.

Both the forums for World of Warcraft and my LiveJournal Friends had to declare spoiler bans, and I've had to politely interrupt friends and co-workers to avoid hearing too much. I still accidentally read a leak or two, though nothing to ruin my fun. (I had decided that even a complete spoil wouldn't kill it for me - little of the book truly surprised me - I felt more curiosity about the journey than the destination, if you get my meaning.) Still, it took effort to avoid knowing more than I wanted. Somehow, my separate worlds of WoW, LJ, NASA, and my local friends circles all became united by this series finale, and there was Potter discussion in every direction.

As the days move forward, it seems to become harder and harder to keep separate all the little facets of my life. Without my involvement, my separate friends groups are merging, my interests are crossing over, my worlds are colliding. I think that the Borg used to be terrifying (pre-Voyager) because we know we are headed in that very direction; a race of minds linked instantly to each other, sometimes even when we'd prefer not to be; a race increasingly unable to escape our dependence on the tools we've created without drastic, unpleasant changes in who we are and who we want to be.

I'm not saying it has to be a horrible thing. It's less stressful, in a lot of ways, to be able to avoid keeping up these compartments in my mind. As well, I've gained access to new opportunities and experiences this way. I don't at all think that we must lose all we treasure about our humanity and become a race of blotchy drones with frickin' laser beams on our heads; but still, every time I see someone reading e-mail on her Blackberry while talking into her Bluetooth earpiece, I wonder how close we are to the line at which Resistance Will Become Futile.

P.S. Wrote this up on the Newton, moved it to the laptop when I got home, then posted it to LJ. Beep.