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I didn't buy The Locus Awards 30 year collection when it first came out. I had read most of the stories and had them in other collections. But then it got remaindered and so seemed a better bit at a much reduced price even if only for the few stories I hadn't read before. I actually intended to only read those stories but I ended up reading the whole thing. A testament to the quality of the stories. It can be fun to try to second guess the minds of the editors of "best of" anthologies like this one. I.e. What does the selection of stories as a whole say about the tastes of the editors? In this case Jonathan Strahan and Charles N Brown.

What I noticed most clearly was that these stories almost all strongly feature the nature of the civilisation/society as an important aspect of the story. In many cases, the shape of the society was the whole point of the story. This is very interesting given that so much of the society represented on this genre is just our own transplanted or a standard one such as a variant of the pseudo medieval one used in much epic fantasy. If the culture is different, it is still usually just an element of world building rather than the main focus of the story. I would venture to suggest that of all the usual story focuses (technology, plot, character etc) that culture is one of the the least used. That is a pity as the SF genre is uniquely suited to exploration of the nature of culture and authors like Ursula Le Guin and John Varley illustrate how well it can be done. Clearly the editors of this anthology agree.

A while back I said that I was giving up Alexander McCall Smith's No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. The writing of the stories and characters had fallen into a rut and the odour of post colonial condescension just wouldn't go away. However because I had found the first ones so engaging, I thought I would try out the other series by this author. I figured that since The Sunday Philosophy Club had new characters it might be fresher. As well, the book is set in Scotland and so the post colonial thing should not be an issue. Well the new characters were not engaging for me and I also learned that I had been wrong about post colonial attitudes towards Botswana. The condescension I has detected had been the ordinary garden variety and The Sunday Philosophy Club has it by the bucketful. So much so that I just could not gather any empathy for the main character at all. No empathy = no engagement = no enjoyment = no more reading this author.

This story is very satisfying. It gives a proper answer to the Fermi paradox. Basically it says that alien civilisations have not had sufficient time since the beginning of the universe to find us. Good answer!

I watched Volver this afternoon. It was going well although perhaps lacking a little of the emotional intensity I have come to expect from Almodóvar. That still makes it pretty intense however. Then at the half way stage the subtitles went out of sync so that they didn't appear until about 10 seconds after the dialogue. That really makes it hard to follow. Still, not as hard as a French film I went to many years ago when the subtitles disappeared completely. At least I know a bit of French but the dialogue was a bit too fast for me to catch very much. Today it became a memory trick to relate the written dialogue back to what had already happened - I sort of became used to it but it was never really satisfactory. Perhaps I should learn a bit more Spanish.

As I was getting ready for bed last night I heard a sound a bit like a muffled siren from somewhere inside the house. It was the sound of electronics in distress. I traced the noise to the master control box for the house alarm system. Not a good sound given that the alarm was disabled. I took the cover of the panel off to find that the backup battery system was the source of the sound and quite a bit of heat besides. The battery was quite hot and obviously in the process of failing. Disconnecting it sorted out the offending sound. Not that I cared so much at that point. I casually mentioned taking the panel off above, but I didn't mention that that activates the alarm sirens and I couldn't shut them off via the keypad. The resulting noise only stopped off when I disconnected the battery as well as turning off mains power to the alarm. Boy those little piezo sirens pack a lot of noise power. The thing is what I was just able to make out was that while the internal noisemakers were making this racket, the main siren outside was not working. Clearly time for the alarm system to get a proper service.

It has been a long time since I had the alarm serviced. The company that did it last time has gone out of business. This morning I called the people who had bought out their customer database since that seemed the logical course of action. In the spirit of handing out credit where it is due, I have to say I was very impressed by the experience. The people on the phone were friendly and efficient as they took my details and explained likely costs. The service chap arrived when he said he would and explained exactly what he was doing. He quickly went through the problems step by step isolating the single faulty component and replacing it rather than taking the easy and expensive (for me) way out of replacing the whole unit. He also gave me a price breakdown as he went so that it was a no surprise exercise. He even told me where I could get a replacement battery next time which would be cheaper than getting them to do it. All in all a very professional operation. It gives you a good feeling to know that it is possible for an operation can be run like that.

Home handyman jobs are not exactly a strength of mine. As I have confessed in the past, I can manage the simple stuff but anything complex is a bit much. I also procrastinate on tasks. For each one I get done, I buy the bits I need for many more which just sit in my storeroom. But today I decided to have a go at one of the tasks slowly rusting there. Inevitably it was bookshelves that got me interested. In the past I have assembled lots of kitset shelves. But this time it was a bit more fundamental. A couple of planks, a few brackets and some screws. I have run out of suitable wall space to put kitsets so high mounted shelves above other stuff seemed the way to go. The main problem being that the planks were too long for the space intended. I am rather proud that I managed to shorten them cleanly without the proper equipment. Score one for my ability to improvise. Anyway, I got the job done and now all my small format short story collections have a home which looks just the way I intended to look..

All that is not really the point. I skinned a knuckle putting up one of the brackets and it bled a bit. The question is, does spilling blood in the course of a job make a successful outcome more satisfying or less satisfying?

It has taken the best part of two weeks just to read a couple of hard sf titles. As a reading rate for me that just sucks. The solution - read some fantasy. Specifically Voice of our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll. It took just a few hours. Basically it is just a little ghost story. Or perhaps the exorcism of some inner demons. Of course, being Carroll, the characters are intricate and more than a little unbalanced. It is all about the trauma.

Carroll has been around writing in the fantasy genre for a while and on my limited reading, he seems to be every bit as good as his fans say he is. The time in the genre factor is interesting. I suspect that if he was starting up now, the modern lit crowd would not let him go. You would hear the cries of "it isn't fantasy, it is literature" in all the fashionable review mags. Carroll still gets reviewed in those mags but they cannot claim him as their own . He writes fantasy. Damn fine fantasy.

I have this picture in my head. A bunch of hard SF authors are sitting around chewing the fat - maybe at a con. There are some big names there - Bear, Benford, Brin, McDevitt, Niven, Resnick, Sawyer and more. They are discussing some of the ideas that go into books. Especially some of the ones that don't work so well or have descended into cliché. You know the ideas that I mean - intelligent dinosaurs, spaceships going back in time which crash and kill the dinosaurs, closed time-like causality curves, moving the sun, moving the earth, huge walls around the earth, merging humans and computers to create a god-like composite, intelligence arising out of the global computer network, intelligence guiding the evolution of intelligence, aliens collecting species in a huge zoo and so on. So many ideas. Then some clever clogs says "I wonder if you could put them all into one story". Everybody laughs. Then Robert A Metzger says "I'll do it". Everybody laughs again. Then they realise that he is serious and they chip in with ideas. Thus Cusp is written.

Cusp is not a comedy pastiche. It is a real story with all those elements in and it does more or less work. More or less. It creaks at the seams with concepts and ideas. So much so that things like character depth go out the window after the first few chapters. But when you think about it, that is a few chapters more than many hard sf authors ever manage. The plot is, of course, hugely contrived but it does hold together. You really do have to admire the skill of somebody who can pull all this together. "Admire" rather than "enjoy" being the distinction to make here. Not that there aren't some fun bits here and there - especially near the start as the scenes are being set. In the end though, I was just wishing he had picked one concept and gone with that. Given the skill on display I am sure it would have been much better.

( Picture of bow below cut )

I'm running out of ways to complain about the weather. Just too many wet days to get my head around. Now I know the escapees from Glasgow I spent the evening with tell me that it is like this 9 months of the year where they came from but here in Welly it isn't supposed to be this bad. I suppose I could blame Murphy for this. My mother claims that it always rains when she washes the windows. Well I went a step further and bought some solar powered garden lights. There has been no direct sunshine since. But I made it worse this morning. I was going into town and before I left, I noticed that a tyre was looking a little bit flat. I resolved to put some air in it on my way home. It was only raining lightly when I parked the car in town. When I got back, it was pissing down. The tyre on the car was pretty much flat. How about that for a cliché - flat tyre in pouring rain. Luckily I wasn't far from my usual garage and they cheerfully fixed things for me. Their tyre guy even admired my car - something that I haven't experienced for a while.

Something for the language curmudgeons to gnaw at. Somebody has come up with this list of overused terms that should be eliminated from the language. Some are terms you don't hear so much here. Do you have any better candidates?

The way the book stuff in this blog works is that I like to find an angle. Once I have that then I can write something. Sometimes it is a proper review but more often it is just a limited comment. The angle usually occurs while I am reading the book rather than afterwards. From time to time I get more than one idea and have to pick one. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly clever, I manage to incorporate more than one approach - but not often.

In the case of City of Pearl by Karen Traviss I considered looking at how to make an unsympathetic character work in a novel. I thought about how an author can incorporate a political point of view in their work without losing the plot (sorry). I paused briefly on the first contact approach. Then I wondered about the monoculture like nature of hard SF. That was quickly supplanted by comparing the monoculture of the American variety with what comes from authors from elsewhere around the world. That lead to considering the way environmental issues are addressed by sf authors and how that has changed recently. Perhaps most appealing I thought about tomatoes and their connection to the political language of oppressed minorities.

Instead I did this. Read the book.

I know some of you like to support the underdog. Others are drawn to the obscure. For you I have Zyzzyx Road. A film which may well be the least successful movie ever. You know you want to see it.

Another book film comparison. I went to see The Prestige today. In the early years, Christopher Priest knew how to write a straight forward novel. These days, there isn't much evidence of that. His books are layered and convoluted and The Prestige is no exception. By comparison, the film is very simple and open. That isn't saying a lot. There are still hidden elements and multiple levels of flashback. It works. Direct enough to follow but complex enough to be engrossing. It looked good too - really good. I'm not so sure about the performances - they weren't bad but I never lost the impression that I was looking at actors rather than the characters they were playing. Overall, well worth going to see. Just one thing - there are a number of hidden reveals in the story. Reading the book first will lessen the impact of the film and probably vice versa.

Even back in primary school days, my main reading interest was in books from the SF genre. That was quite a problem given that I was attending a small school out in the country - there were not many such books on the shelves. I eagerly awaited the country library service van bringing a change of books so that I could see if there were any new titles in my preferred area. That ignores the even larger issue that there were not all that many suitable titles available anyway. It seems that things seem much better these days - there are lots of names of authors being bandied about as being suitable for younger readers. One such is Eoin Colfer who seems to get a lot of positive chatter. Based on that and the $1 price tag I bought and read The Supernaturalist. It was simple and clear with a strong story, flashy gadgets in a futuristic setting and strong characters. My ten year old self would have loved it.

The other slim volume of short stories for recent travel south was Absolute Uncertainty by Lucy Sussex. I read it on way home with four over-sugared kids making a lot of noise in the seats in front of me. Actually, not so much in the seats as running up and down the aisle. Not so much making a lot of noise as screaming. Somehow it didn't seem so bad while I was reading the book. I have said it before, but it stands repeating - Lucy has a wonderful clear prose style that just sucks you in. It lets you put a bubble around yourself. Even the stories I had read before protected me from the running around and noise. Nothing protected me when they started kicking my foot.

How many Heisenbergs does it take to change a light bulb?

While I'm thinking about science, I should note that Sciam have put their year's best list together. I'm feeling pretty satisfied that I had read in one form or another almost all of these stories. It has been a goal of mine to keep up with the scientific state of play better. The only one I care about missing was this one about quantum teleportation developments. It goes quite a way to address my scepticism about the practical application of this technology.

For reading material while travelling or waiting at terminals I tend to choose slim volumes of short stories because in more ways than one they are easy to manage in a hostile environment. First cab off the rank this time around was Written in Blood by Chris Lawson. I'm not entirely sure how I ended up owning this book but I suspect it was on the recommendation of somebody at a dealers table at a con. Whoever did the sell job must have been persuasive because I get a lot of recommendations and ignore the majority simply for logistical reasons. This time I would like to find out who that person was and thank them because I really enjoyed Written in Blood. I'm tempted to say "bloody brilliant writing" but that might be a bit silly even if accurate.

The stories in this book are mostly works of hard science fiction. That is to say, aspects of known (i.e. not imagined) science or technology are central to the stories. The stories are told as the impact of that science on people with a bit of philosophy thrown in. Although hard science fiction is most associated with cosmology and space science, in this case the science is more to the biological side. Lawson's interest seems wider than that, but biology seems to be at the core. The important thing which really distinguishes this work is not the science but the impact on people aspect. The characters seem real. As a reader, being able to identify with the characters means that I can also identify with the impact of the science. This is the way this type of writing should be done - science and people.

There are not many stories in this slim volume. Even less than you might at first think because the book is padded out with a variety of essays relating to science and society. The essays are every bit as good as the stories but it does mean one thing - there isn't enough. I want more.

Each year at this time the family gathers together in South Canterbury. They have their own probably seasonal reasons but for me it is simply about keeping the family ties. So how did it go? Well before I report on that I should note that I managed to break yet another tooth while doing some shopping in Timaru - it does not hurt in itself but eating and talking means my tongue hurts like hell because of the jagged edges. In addition something I ate, probably a mussel, meant that I spent a day feeling weak and nauseous. And yet it was the best family get together in years. I had a great time catching up with everybody and they all seemed to have fun too. The little annoyances go away when the important things work.

In the afterword to Quantico by Greg Bear it says "I have tried to persuade of the dangers...". Yes this novel has a message and it didn't need an afterword for that to be obvious. Bear isn't usually all that big on message in his work, so when he decides to have a go at the American climate of fear, government security agencies and the hazards of biological terrorism, the question has to be asked - does all this get in the way of his storytelling. To my way of thinking, the answer unfortunately is yes. ( more blah blah )

At this time of year, the need to find some easy way of distracting the attention of others seems to come up. Maybe you are at a loss for entertainment or just need a few quiet minutes to get something done. If you lack a Viewmaster then these optical illusions are good for a few moments off distraction instead.

How many times do you watch a movie and say "wow that it so much better than the book"? For a variety of reasons, it just isn't something you hear very often. Children of Men, the movie, is so much better than the book. There, I said it.

Words you just do not want to hear from your dentist - "oh dear, we are going to have to do that again". These words from a man who amongst the distractions in his surgery is a poster depicting a cartoon version of hell and the words "Abandon all hope ye who enter here".

This was work to repair a filling that an extra sticky toffee pulled out a few weeks ago. It left a jagged edge which was abrading my tongue but it wasn't a big or deep hole. It turned out to be a rather bigger job than expected especially when the replacement filling failed to adhere to the rest of the tooth and so they had to go with a different filling material and bonding agent. On the positive side, it turns out that that toffee did me a favour. It seems that there was some decay going on underneath a filling in that tooth and it would have got a lot worse before being detected if not for having to do the repair work.

On the way home, I was reflecting that there are a lot of negatives to visiting a dentist and the best you can get as a positive is that it would be worse if you didn't go. But of all the bad things, for me the worst is the realisation that teeth are the hardest and toughest bits of your body and they still crumble away on you. What does that say for the rest of you. Depressing huh? Except that the depression didn't last long as I started to think about all those festive season foods that I can enjoy without worrying about a jagged edge on a tooth.

Wouldn't being a cosmo-topologist be a great job? I would so love to be the person who suggested that the universe is a dodecahedron. This isn't recent news, but I wanted to share it because I have always thought that the Platonic and Archimedian solids were huge fun.

Joseph Barbera died today. Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones and the rest had too much impact on my formative years for this to pass unremarked. Thank you.

When I was working for the BNZ I spent a lot of time working with the marketing people on campaigns. One of the things which really stood out was how many people are really driven by rewards programmes. It is astonishing how many people can be persuaded to get a credit card in exchange for a few Fly Buys or airpoints. Loyalty schemes seem to be proliferating as marketers catch on to how well they work. I note that buyers of Sanitarium's more popular kid-oriented cereal products can now accumulate bonus points to exchange for rewards.

I wonder how far this can go. It occurs to me that there is a solution to the problem of unpaid traffic fines here. Just offer Fly Buys points or the like to people when they pay the fine. You could have a sliding scale so that fast payers get more points. The main drawback I can see is that a certain portion of the population would deliberately get parking tickets to earn the points. I'm not exaggerating this - some people are really that obsessed.

So does anybody else out there download multiple different torrents for the same show and set them all off in a race to see which one downloads the fastest?

No, I didn't think so.

In my defence, it is more fun than watching the NZ cricket team.

I was watching some Family Guy episodes on DVD last night. They did a little Peanuts homage. On the commentary, the writers ragged on Snoopy Come Home. They said that it was one of the most depressing pieces of TV animation ever. Well my childhood memories of this show were a bit different. So I watched Snoopy Come Home this morning. It really is pretty depressing and does not have much merit otherwise. Neither does A Charlie Brown Christmas. Childhood memories are not what they used to be.

I have always liked the Peanuts strip. It is still one of my daily reads - the peanuts.com site does a daily "classic" strip. But watching these animations again after so many years emphasised to me why so many cartoons strips and comics don't always animate so well and why they have an even harder time translating to live action. The internal dialogue of the printed comic is missing. On screen it is all about external dialogue - you can't hear what the characters are thinking. In Peanuts, the best bits are Snoopy's thoughts. Without them the animations are lifeless. It is different with Family Guy - it was written for Television and does not have to accommodate a paper based legacy.

This is not a universal rule. You see, I finally was able to see the live action version of The Tick earlier in the week. I love Ben Edlund's comic and thought the animated version was good but not great. However the live action version is superb. It captures the spirit of the comic and yet isn't really the same. It is a show written for television that takes genuine inspiration from the comic rather than paying lip service to a few aspects of it. The Tick live action show was cancelled pretty quickly. I wish I could remember who said "Television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done". Well I still have some more Family Guy to watch.

I seem to have fallen into a "yes but" mode when recording my reading. Mention the good stuff and then throw in the caveats. It is a structural formula which is OK once in a while but I shouldn't keep doing it every time. So we come to Temeraire by Naomi Novik and I just want to go "yes but" again. The "yes" is big. This book has gained a lot of good reviews and I can see why. It is very engaging. Great characterisation and great page turning writing. It is just rollicking good fun - dragons in the Napoleonic wars what could be better than that.

( Gotta be a counterpoint )

It was the Phoenix quiz tonight. As usual when I set a quiz, I worried that my questions would be too easy. As usual, things were a bit on the hard side. One of the harder questions was the following - I suspect my flist might do a bit better with it:

Name the Australian magazine which espouses the following reasons for existing:
• Because not enough humorous SF & Fantasy gets into print
• Because SF can be printed AND entertaining at the same time
• Because it's not the size of the sword, it's where you stick it
• Because too many 'light-hearted, un-serious' stories are rejected
• Because first-time authors have a hell of a time getting into print

Afterwards, there was a bit of discussion about the way a quiz can be used as a way of informing people as well as testing them. I got "that sounds interesting" comments about this question and I know some people took note of the url that I gave them with the answer. More interest than I have ever got from telling people about ASIM actually. So who wants to be in next year's quiz?

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