Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes

Failure is not updating here for more than a week.

Failure is a department store having a shirt that I wanted to buy and then not having any of their sales counters staffed. There was one counter in the store with people on it, but they refused to serve me. Turns out they "have nothing to do with" the store - they just sell their own stuff inside it.

Failure is stuff.co.nz thinking that a site revamp is just about visual appeal and customisation and completely forgetting that information accessibility is the heart of a news site. The site has a nice clean look but they used to be the best site for getting news rapidly The information density and navigation meant you were never more than a click away from the story you wanted. Now you have to go hunting through many pages and so they are now just another middle ranging member of the pack.

Failure in 1987 is publishing an anthology called "The Science Fiction Yearbook", subtitled "The Best Short SF of 1987" and then the editor, David S. Garnett selecting the stories from a very narrow style subsection of the genre. The stories are actually a pretty good bunch, but the effect is somewhat spoiled for me by the mismatch between the title and the contents. It could easily have been saved by a mission statement of some sort in the introduction which clarified the selection criteria. For example, David Hartwell does this well in his "Best of" series. I appreciate it when an editor is able to state their intentions in an introduction. Done well it may only take a sentence or two and yet really help with understanding the anthology. Failure is effectively saying "I pick what I like". While probably true, it does nothing at all to justify the narrow focus of something with such a wide ranging title.

Its funny what excites some people. If you are interested in the science of crystallography, any mention of five-fold symmetry in crystal formation is exciting stuff. The following certainly perked up my interest:

A team of UK researchers has grown ice crystals in which the water molecules are arranged into pentagons rather than the hexagons found in every natural snowflake.

The unusual ice was grown on a copper surface under a vacuum at -173°C. It owes its pentagonal form to the way the water molecules bond with the underlying copper.

The article in New Scientist is here.

If you are wondering why crystals with five-fold symmetry are so unusual, think about floor tiles. They can have 2-fold symmetry like rectangles, three fold like triangles, 4-fold like squares or 6-fold like a hexagon. Its a bit more complex than that because you can, for example, combine 2 triangles into a rectangle. Overall there are 17 different symmetry arrangements possible for tessalating tiles ("plane space groups") and none of them have 5-fold symmetry. Just try fitting a bunch of pentagons together without gaps and you will see the problem.

The same is true in three dimensions. So while individual molecules and living things can have five-fold rotational symmetry, it is very unusual in crystals. It has only been in the last 20 - 30 years that they have been found at all and new examples don't come along very often - never for something as simple as water ice. In science, new and unusual is exciting.

OK, this just has me perplexed. See I have one of those desk calendars that gives you a trivia question per day. On Friday, it posed the question "Where might you hear people mention the terms penultimate and rover?" The answer given, from a multi-choice set is "On a cricket pitch".

They are valid English words, and I suppose you could fit them into the description of a game but I wouldn't think them distinctively cricket terms in any way. For example penultimate does occasionally get used by commentators in a restricted overs match, but it isn't common. Then perhaps "rover" is just somebody mishearing "over" but I haven't spotted anything else that badly researched. The other questions are very American and rather old which might be a factor (it also makes it a crap calendar generally).

Google does not group the words sensibly, so I'm turning to you. Any ideas?

For those of you who noted the other day that there seemed to be something in the water causing a convergence around The Princess Bride will be pleased to see that even xkcd is not immune.

Inevitable really. The Middleman has been cancelled. Sigh. But not unexpected - in modern TV, the good die young.

Y'know people do go on a bit about the natural beauty of this country - mountain stuff, lake stuff, volcanic/geothermal stuff, tree stuff and so on. But they never talk about the clouds. We have great clouds here - the orientation of the main mountain ranges relative to the prevailing winds mean lots of turbulent cloud formations. I like watching clouds - I always have. That probably explains a lot about me really.

But anyway, here is a picture taken from my front door looking east at dawn on Monday. This is why I like clouds.

Dollhouse made its debut last night. I was expecting there to be vast amounts of comment around the wires. But no - a bit here and there among the likely suspects but not much at all.

( I have a theory - well an opinion really )

They made a Dead Like Me movie. I didn't know it was coming. What a nice surprise. I even stopped watching the cricket to watch it. I have to say there was some trepidation though - the reunion sequel does not always work so well.

( Spoilerish notes here )

More days should have stuff like this in them.

I know a few of you have published SF anthologies of some sort over the years. This is for you...

I read an anthology called Omega edited by Roger Elwood. It appears to be an ambitions early '70s collection of stories by authors trying hard to push the "new wave" envelope. It does not work all that well but you had to admire the editor for trying to find out where things could be pushed.

I was interested enough to find out a little more so I looked up Roger Elwood's Wikipedia entry. You really should have a read. I really can't see anybody here ending up like this, but its worth having a look so you know who to blame when you can't get your anthology published.

In other news, today on National Radio was a report on Wikipedia planning changes to the way biographical entries can be updated.

When Jeremy Clarkson hears an engine note that he particularly loves, what engine does he relate it back to? When Michael Wood starts doing his "In Search of..." documentaries, who is pretty much the first subject? When TV producers want a subject for a new series featuring a youthful wizard, where do they look? Yes, its Merlin - well Arthur and Merlin really. They get everywhere.

I mention Merlin in particular, because I recently read three novels in succession all of which invoke Merlin in some way. All in different ways as it happens - an indication of the flexibility and wide use of the character over the years. Charles de Lint uses him as a kind of forest spirit presence in the opening of Spiritwalk. It isn't de Lint's best work - it may well be the opposite - it is the sequel to Moonheart, and like that book suffers from too much stuff crammed in it compared to his later more focussed work.

In Illuminations, Gillian Polack uses a version of Arthurian times for the setting of a fantasy tale found in an old library - both Arthur and Merlin get a mention or two. However, they don't get such a look in during the other story that winds its way through letters that bridge the Arthurian fable and that is where the really fascinating part of the story takes place.

The Last Watch is the fourth book in a trilogy by Sergei Lukyanenko and it shows typical fourth book weaknesses of story. What is more, it invokes merlin much more than the books mentioned above. Turns out Merlin was ...[spoilers removed] - I don't need to tell you what, I'm sure you have seen the same type of thing before. The real problem with The Last Watch, making it weaker than the others, is that it is missing a major character - Moscow.

I suppose it isn't surprising - Arthur & Merlin really are the most powerful myth to emanate from the British Isles. Its hard to even think who #2 may be - Beowulf I suppose. I suppose it depends on how you define "myth" though.

Oh, and I should mention that I'm told that Mary Stewart's Merlin books are going to be reissued after many years out of print. I read them in High school. I wonder how well they hold up.

I can't help it. I buy titles from secondhand stores or remainder bins just because the blurb looks vaguely interesting. I.e. I spend small amounts of my money on purchases with no research and no real knowledge of what the book will be like. I take the book home and put on my to-read shelf. Then the doubts set in. I wonder if the book is going to be any good. In the meantime, there are books by authors I know waiting to be read. As a result the to-read shelf fills up with these cheap on-spec purchases. Every so often I make an effort to clear out a few of these - preferably by reading them - or at least trying to read them. Unless they surprise me with unexpected quality, they usually pass without comment here. One raised an interesting question however.

Divergence by Tony Ballantyne is a bit of a train wreck really. Not content with starting this space opera off by 20 pages of a spaceship crew bickering stupidly amongst themselves, the next big chunk of the book is taken up with over elaborate back-story flashbacks. But it had the plot device of of an almost god-like AI manipulating people according to some ineffable plan to some result that the AI desires. It is the space opera equivalent of a prophecy myth in fantasy.

That is what got me thinking. Where have all the prophecy legends gone? They used to be everywhere. Now you hardly ever see one. I get why that might be - its hard to build up a decent threat when you know that the prophecy is going to see everybody right. Divergence suffered from that same lack of threat. So am I just reading the wrong fantasy books or has prophecy gone out of fashion?

Dymocks Welly has Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. Interestingly, the unabridged audiobook version as read by Neil costs less than the physical book. Whats a guy to do - for the difference I can buy the mass market edition when it comes out later in the year. What would you do?

I don't really read much in the way of longer novel-length horror fiction. I much prefer the shorter form. There is really only one author I make an exception for and that is Christopher Fowler. Its something to do with the quality of the characters and location that he manages to draw. You might wonder if he can match that appeal in the short story arena - can he condense down the characters and stories and still manage to create a chilling atmosphere? Yes he can. No doubt about it as Sharper Knives shows. And he does it with varying subject matter - sometimes invoking the supernatural and sometimes leaving humans to do it all on their own.

I have to say that stories where all the evil come from purely from human sources is the more unsettling - it makes it all too real. The scariest story of all - the introduction. That is where Fowler lets us know where his inspiration from. All that scary energy comes from you and me and the rest of humanity.

I'm in South Canterbury for a few days doing the family thing and the sun has finally come out from behind the crowds. That means of course that it has been good reading weather. So my "good for reading at airports" book has been finished ahead of expectations. It was Sean Williams' Earth Ascendant - the second book in the Astropolis series. Sean's stuff is always good fun to read and this one is no exception. But these, not very original, questions did come to mind.

How many space operas that feature huge empires, vast time spans, travel across thousands of lightyears and hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences end up with a handgun fight through the halls of what is effectively an imperial palace?

How many second books of a trilogy could be almost completely dispensed with from a plot progression point of view with the exception perhaps of a single bit of knowledge or key artifact?

I've not been doing all that much reading lately. Instead I have been watching a bunch of old TV shows - the consequence of buying myself a new media player. After working through the complete Daria, I started watching Absolute Power. In one episode the PR types were discussing the focus groups for the Prime Minister's Desert Island Disks appearance. You know the show - where some celebrity picks the music that they would take with them if they were stranded on a desert island. I started musing on that for myself which naturally led to thinking about Desert Island books. If I could take just 5 books with me to some isolated spot, what would they be?

But then the interesting bit started. As I started to think about the books, I realised that the books I would take would not be novels - it would be short story collections. There might be an element of practicality there - a large collection of short stories is much more likely to keep me amused for many re-readings than a novel, even the best of novels. But really it is more about what I would most want to read.

Not just any collections either - but specifically single author ones. What little reading I have been doing recently has been themed anthologies or best-of compilations. I.e. multi-author. I have just finished Extraordinary Engines edited by Nick Gevers and it is a good steampunk themed collection although less than the sum of its parts. But it isn't what I would take away. Nor are the big Dozois best-of collections despite their word count. Rather, I would take collections like George R R Martin's Dreamsongs - collections across a career. There are similar ones by the likes of Ellison and Varley that I would take too.

It is an interesting exercise. It really focusses the mind on what is important to you - literary speaking that is.

Of course if I was really going to be stranded on a desert island, top of my list of books to take would be ones with titles like How to survive on a desert island.