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Monday, November 16th, 2009
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My wife has been gradually breaking the news to me that she's been writing fanfic, specifically a Deathnote fanfic. It's rather long. In fact, as she told me over the weekend, when she reformatted it for printing using 11 point Times New Roman and adding page breaks at appropriate spots, it's 270 pages long. It's a frickin novel, and not a nanowrimo mini-novel either. She's got it in a binder and everything. I'm torn. On the one hand, it's great that she's actually written something, since that was her degree field and her interest. Creative activity is always good and should be praised. On the other hand, it's fanfic and thus stolen property. No matter how good it may be, it isn't done by the same artist and it isn't the actual vision; it's an unauthorized cover of the material, and most times you just don't want to hear yet one more flawed rendition of "Stairway to Heaven". Cover bands and art forgers are not ideal role models.
I'm going to have to read it, and I hope it's good, but it gives me a quease. I mean, I understand the whole community interaction part of sharing your work, and I somewhat understand the internal vetting process that goes on by seeing how well different people understand and reproduce the different characters and settings; it's a socialization thing, and a way of establishing a pecking order. But I don't understand why anybody would sink so much time and effort into a creative product that isn't theirs. Why not go ahead and do all of the fun and interesting stuff (world building, character design) since you're doing all of the hard, tedious, and boring work of description and dialogue anyway? Then you'd have the satisfaction of actually creating something new, as well. Or at least create your own characters within the setting and explore a new part of the space; I mean, if you play a superhero game, nobody really wants to play Superman, do they? They might want to see him around, hear about his exploits, but for God's sake they aren't going to play as an established character. (Maybe there are a lot of people who do. Game publishers certainly seem to think so. But it has no appeal to me. It's not as though there is a shortage of ideas floating around.)
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
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"The Sword of the Lady", S. M. Stirling. Arthur plucks Excalibur from the bosom of... Nantucket? This is the latest installment in his series about "the Change", which began with "Dies The Fire". I think I missed that one, but I've picked up the others. Nantucket is Stirling's Tanelorn, apparently; he seems to be weaving together threads from three separate yet thematically related series there. He writes well, even if I have trouble swallowing some of the more mystic trappings, so I expect to keep reading them as long as he keeps writing them.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
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"Rides A Dread Legion", Raymond E. Feist. Start of another trilogy(?) set in his old D&D/EPT/etc campaign, pitting an unstoppable demon horde against exiled elves who just happen to be coming home, hilarity ensues etc. I actually enjoyed it and will be getting the rest of them, although what I really drool for right now is another Malazan volume. I want that in my hands as soon as possible, but I don't know when it's getting released. I think all ten volumes have been published in the UK... need to check on that. I've only seen eight so far.
Got sucked back into Drawf Fortress for a bit lately. Like the Sims and other city-builders it wears on me after a while, since if there's no victory condition my motivation runs out after a while. I'd almost rather write my own fantasy simulator, if I thought I'd stick with it long enough to finish it. The way those things usually run is that I get the idea, I work out a lot of mechanics on paper, maybe structure some code, and then something shiny comes along and it goes into a drawer, like a journal. There are many many shiny things in the world, and many of those journalish scribblings tucked away down here.
Finished listening to the Teaching Company's Shostakovich biography the other day (I've been working through the Great Masters series, halfway through now although not in any temporal order). It was jarring to immediately throw one of my birthday presents into the player (Mindless Self Indulgence's "You'll Rebel To Anything") and blast "Shut Me Up" at high volume. Ah, rock music, the chamber music of the age. Provided you have very large chambers.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
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"Flood", Stephen Baxter.
There's nothing quite like a good global disaster story, something that pushes the human race into a corner and doesn't let up. This one doesn't have quite the bleakness of "On The Beach", "Level 7", etc, but it is inexorable. It also gives a potential backstory for a Kevin Costner movie.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Monday, September 14th, 2009
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"By Heresies Distressed", David Weber. Another installment in his "Safehold" series, which is basically heroic fantasy with a science fiction premise. Standard Weberian fare. He uses an annoying phonic spelling for names; you know what the name ought to be, but the phonic spelling is usually off by quite a bit from what it should be. Such as the scheming King Nahrmahn Baytz. Dude, stop trying to be cute. Bunch and Cole did it better in the Sten series, Sapir and Murphy did it _way_ better in the Destroyer series, you can't hope to compete in that space. It didn't work in Horseclans, it doesn't work here. Just spell the fucking name out. And naturally, since it's Weber, he just can't resist having the most repugnant villain in the Evil Empire be a sanctimonious, hypocritical, delusional womanizer named Clinton, er, Clyntahn.
For all that, it's still way better than yet another Star Wars novel, Mercedes Lackey EFP, or modern vampire romance.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Sunday, August 30th, 2009
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"Rift In The Sky", Julie E. Czerneda.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
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"Kushiel's Mercy", Jacqueline Carey. Closes out the second of her Eluan "Kushiel" trilogies, alternate history romance fantasies with a fair portion of hot kinky sex. Less heavy on bondage elements than some of the earlier ones, particularly the first trilogy (which centered on a divinely-chosen masochist spy.) I'm looking forward to the next trilogy, which starts out in Alba (England) considerably later. Given the teaser at the end of the book, the recently discovered New World may figure prominently in it.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
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Victory Conditions, Elizabeth Moon. Fifth and final installment of Vatta's War. I love a good happy ending. Makes me wish David Weber knew how to write one. Or an ending, even.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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The Getaway Man, Andrew Vachss. Classic noir crime fiction. Not as dark and gritty as the Burke novels, but that still leaves you plenty of room for damaged people and bad behavior.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Saturday, July 11th, 2009
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Juggler of Worlds, Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner. Middle book in a pre-Ringworld, Puppetteer-centric trilogy. This one largely covers the events of Neutron Star from the viewpoints of ARM agent Sigmund Ausfaller and several Puppetteers, with some additional material never previously addressed. Largely a cop-out, like Orson Scott Card's retelling of the entire Ender series from an alternate viewpoint, but unlike with Card's writing I'm still interested in what Niven's ghostwriters have to say.
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"Mage-Guard of Hamor", L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Another installment in the saga of Recluce. Order vs chaos and the machinations of empire.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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"Singularity Sky", Charles Stross. Prequel to "Iron Sunrise"; post-Singularity espionage and travelogue. I may never look at mimes and molerats in the same way again.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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"Programming Clojure", Stuart Halloway. Clojure is a fairly new programming language, based on Lisp and targeted to the Java Virtual Machine. It takes advantage of the Java environment, and uses a number of new features that make it more appealing to me than other Lisps. Doesn't mean I'll use it on a regular basis, but it's an intriguing tool. And the book is well written, unlike a number of programming language guides; it shows you why a particular feature is important and useful, instead of just proclaiming you an idiot for not comprehending the splendor of the feature at its merest mention (like almost every other Lisp book). Its refreshing lack of snobbery is, um, refreshing.
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"Evil Genius", Catherine Jinks. Young genius embraces evil, finds soul mate, recants. I liked it a lot; a real page turner. A sequel is in the works, apparently, surprise.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Saturday, June 20th, 2009
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"WWW: Wake", Robert J. Sawyer. A story of an emergent AI, apparently the first in a trilogy about said AI. Interesting ideas, although a bit more of a talky procedural than I usually go for. All in all, a lot cheerier than many of these stories go; Colossus, the Adolescence of P1, ... I must be tired, usually I can rattle off a better list of AIs that 'just grew'. Anyway, those usually end badly. This one hasn't, yet, but I suppose if it's a trilogy it's early days yet.
I need to go dig up his Hominids stories, since it seems I missed them.
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"Naked! Cat on her head!"
Just so I remember that later without all the clicky-clicky.
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Why must I feel like that? Why must I chase the cat? Nothing but the dog in me.
Geeze, it only took like 10, 15 years for me to figure out where that 'bow wow wow' riff Snoop Dogg used came from. I suck at musical literacy. *hangs head in shame*
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
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I picked up a Facebook page a while back because it seemed like something all the cool kids were doing. (Well, Jean did it, and that was good enough for me.) But I didn't see a lot of people on there: a RATMMer here and there, a couple kids from my high school that I didn't know very well, like, ever... not much visible use to me, since hardly anybody I knew was on it. Then came the deluge. Now, it's something I want to log into and make snide comments on. Now, I'm starting to get an idea now people use this crazy thing. It's still hard to find stuff if your circle of friends isn't already using it, but I'm willing to accept that it's not entirely worthless, and that's a big step for me.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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"Turn Coat", Jim Butcher. Dresden Files, wizard politics, big scary battles. Fun stuff.
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