Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

So I got an unexpected get out of jail free card and have been enjoying it.


Varamathras looks like I feel.

Scott called this morning from the Barnes and Nobles in Atlanta. We've been working our way through io9's 14 Best Speculative Fiction Books of 2010. He finished The Wind-Up Girl which I'm still stuck on--I like the chapters with Emiko but I loathe everyone else. Grr.

Anyway he was calling cos B&N had like none of the other books and he was about to give up and go to Amazon. He did pause to ask if I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with him.

Me (reading from web review): "If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power." Llama, this sounds horrible!!!
Scott: Yeaaaaaaah... that was a bad choice wasn't it?
Me (laughing): YES! This is a HORRIBLE choice!
Scott (sheepish): Yeaaaaaah. Okay I'll get this for me and then see if they have How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe.
Me: Yes please!!!

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Saw this NYT article about some coffeehouses banning ereaders and found it deeply amusing. I know I'm really in the minority but I do LIKE ereaders: I like that I can carry a bunch of books with me very easily. I don't like that I can't mark them up, deface or improve the text, or a dozen or more years from now look on one fondly because it holds special memories (like the copy of A Moveable Feast I took to Paris, or the copy of Inglorious I read in Japan while contemplating marriage to Scott), but that's why it's possible to have BOTH things.

(And I've said this before and will say it again: I would totally have my iPad's babies if I could. So there.)

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I crossed the 10k line in my novel. I know it's a drop in the bucket/average size of a Trek story, but it's still something all my own and I feel proud. I've created a file that's a sort of appendices as I work out additional things. Most recently I've been trying to figure out the religion of the people on the planet of Uir. (See, it has a name now. Well that's what the inhabitants call it, not sure what the Terrans call it yet...) Since I'm talking about a half dozen countries on the main continent, I'm thinking there's got to be at least three biggies. Now how do they all interact???

Working, working...

So the other night at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, there was a late night showing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And ten minutes into it, the film breaks. And out walks LEONARD NIMOY, who says, "Oh I'm so sorry about that, the theatre called me out to apologize. I thought maybe you'd like to see the new film to make up for it." And they play the NEW FILM.

AND I WASN'T THERE.

*cries*

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As some solace, my research project got funded. I now have money to buy a Kindle 2, a Fox eSlick ereader, and a lot of ebooks. Heh.

So I recently got to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine. Danny Boyle's previous films being, as you may remember,Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, I was pretty hyped to see this movie. That, and it was billed as the "New Scifi Classic for the @1st Century" or whatever.

And then it got panned, so I was cynical and waited for Netflix.

Now, I actually enjoyed it. The main fault of the film is that the astronauts act like people, not like astronauts. People, when they have determined that they are running out of air to accomplish their mission to save the world, fret and freak and contemplate how unfair it all is. Astronauts decide who is the most vital to the mission and then get on with it. So more time than was necessary was spent on "You mean I'm not going home?" No, you're not going home, stupid. Honestly, you're going to put an explosive mathingy in the Sun to jumpstart it, so how did you ever even contemplate you'd be coming home from that?

Also: Cillian Murphy, a physicist? With emo hair? Not happening. (I'm overlooking the fact that the only physicist I know happens to look like Jesus.)

Anyhow, the first ninety minutes are cool, and I liked the Zen aspect of the astronauts with a death wish to look into the sun and get transubstatiated into shiny gold SFX.

And then there was the fried dude with the God Complex, and I was confused. Cos I have no idea how the fuck he survived his ship. Or why the big fight at the end was in the bomb and why the bomb looked more than a little bit like a holodeck.

Anyhoo. I mostly liked it.

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Making good progress on my Friends of Darkover bibliography. My boss reminded me today if I publish enough I can go up for tenure early. I'm down with that.

I'm kind of at a loss with the Kindle paper. I wrote a hunk and sent it to my colleagues for review but no one has said anything, and I have no idea where we're looking to shop the first paper around anyway, which makes proceeding difficult what with not knowing the audience or the guidelines and what have you.

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I'm aiming to have the Damn Book done revised by May 1. Here's hoping.

Later.

I finished revising the novel. K pointed out there's bits with repetition, and I've fixed that as best I can, and added bits and changed vocabulary here and there. On the whole I think it's a much smoother read now, but let's face it, I am deeply biased.

So yeah, done that bit, yay.

Scott says he's going to read it, he'd just like to do it on the Kindle. Which he can since you can upload your own documents onto the thing. I'm still a fan of the toy and may well treat myself to my own as a birthday present in the summer. There's just something about being able to carry around 200 books in a few square inches. Well, people who have been to my house understand...

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I see things I keep meaning to post about and don't. There's an article at the NYT on the paperless society. The new season of BSG starts April 4 (which means you know what I'm doing at my bachelorette party). The WGA strike may be over soon. I have a list of research topics and various other work things as long as my arm. Yeah....

Farhad Manjoo gets around to reviewing Kindle over at The Machinist. More useful is the commentary in the letters section where people discuss the virtues of the Sony Reader (you can download from Project Gutenberg!) and the price of books anyway. There's also a random posting from someone claiming to be a librarian pointing out all the free books you can get at your local library. Yes, dear, but you have to give them back at some point. And not write in them!

Also, Farhad? Buying 40 books over a five year period does not constitute being a book fanatic. That's about eight books a year--or basically, a good stop at B&N before summer vacation. Really.