Dreamsongs Volume I & The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I haven't updated in a while, so I figured I'd mention these books I read. I've been reading other books too, but I don't know if the KCLS website will let me see my checkout history anymore. Whatever.

Dreamsongs is the name for a two-volume collection of George R.R. Martin's short stories. I checked out the first volume because I was waiting on some other books. While most of the stories are quite good, this collection would be of particular interest to those who have already read some of George R.R. Martin's novels, as these older stories provide a fascinating look at some of his idiosyncrasies as a writer. If you like his novels, you'll probably like his short stories too. While Tuf Voyaging is better overall, these stories have a lot of variety, and would be of particular interest to fans.

As for The Boy Who Would Live Forever, I was eventually going to say something about the Gateway series (if that's the proper name for it). Actually, I have a whole lot to say about the series: it's one of my favorites. I think there might be a few short stories in the continuity that I haven't read yet, so I'll hold off on that rambling until I verify that I've read all of the works in the series. However, for this particular book, I will make a few remarks. I got it through interlibrary loan, because it's not very popular or well-known. Frederick Pohl wrote most of the series in the 1970's and 1980's, and then came out with this in 2004. He didn't become a bad writer in that time. This book is very good, maybe even some of Pohl's best. But just because of that seventeen-year gap, the book apparently fared poorly. Part of that may have to do with the fact that unlike all of the other novels, this one isn't narrated by the character Robinette Broadhead, so it seems removed from the rest of the series thematically, in addition to temporally. If The Boy Who Would Live Forever is treated as a standalone work, it's true that some of the background exposition is half-assed for that purpose (although as reinforcement for those who read the earlier books, it's fine). However, this obviously isn't a standalone novel, so I don't really consider that to be a mark against the book. I'm not sure that I like it better as a way to close the series than the previous novel, Annals of the Heechee, but it's still a fine addition to the series, and for closure, will have to suffice.

Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin

I read this one a while ago and I was going to write about it here, but I never got around to it, so now I'm belatedly posting about this book. I've read a couple of other books since, but I don't plan to write about them for now. We'll see. Anyway, it would be an injustice for me not to say anything about Tuf Voyaging.

This was easily the best science fiction book I've read in a while. How long of a while, I'm not quite sure. Last year, I read collections of stories written by Frederick Pohl and Jack Vance, both of whom also died last year (but that wasn't my fault). Those collections were largely amazing, but part of the value I saw in them was as a showcase of the short fiction of two of the great science fiction writers that started in the "Golden Age" and had long, impressive careers. Anthologies aside, it's been years since I've read any science fiction this good. I guess I'd say that this is the best science fiction novel that I've read since Greg Bear's "The Way" books, which I finished over a year ago. Granted, I haven't been reading much in that time, and also I wasn't quite as enthused about Tuf Voyaging as I was for those books, but it's still very, very good.

George R.R. Martin wrote the foreword to The Jack Vance Treasury (one of the two anthologies I just mentioned) and I knew he was influenced by Vance, but I didn't think his writing was overtly reminiscent of Vance. And then I read this book. It's exquisitely Vancean. I later did a Google search and confirmed my suspicion.

NG: You've frequently expressed admiration for Jack Vance. How Vancean is A Song of Ice and Fire in conception and style? In particular, does the narrative thread featuring the exotic wanderings of Daenerys Targaryen function in part as a tribute to Vance, to his picaresque inventiveness?
GRRM: Jack Vance is the greatest living SF writer, in my opinion, and one of the few who is also a master of Fantasy. His The Dying Earth (1950) was one of the seminal books in the history of modern Fantasy, and I would rank him right up there with Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, and T.H. White as one of the fathers of the genre.
All that being said, I don't think A Song of Ice and Fire is particularly Vancean. Vance has his voice and I have mine. I couldn't write like Vance even if I tried... and I did try, once. The first Haviland Tuf story, "A Beast for Norn," was my attempt to capture some of Vance's effects, and Tuf is a very Vancean hero, a distant cousin to Magnus Ridolph, perhaps. But what that experiment taught me was that only Jack Vance can write like Jack Vance.

I couldn't believe it when I found that. I was so sure that this book was deliberately emulating Vance, and it turned out I was correct. Anyway, it's also a great book in its own right. I highly recommend it to any science fiction fan. I'd say more, but I have an excuse for failing to do so, as usual. This time, my excuse is that I accidentally waited too long after reading the book. So I'll leave it at that.

Some crap from Facebook on February 10th, 2014

Yeah, I'm doing this. We talked about it. Or we didn't. Whatever. I have elected to use this blog as a platform for bitching about onerous drivel clogging my Facebook page because apparently my friends all have terrible taste and lack intellectual rigor. I'm kidding (kind of). Anyway...

First up, one of my friends shared a link:

Really hit the nail on the head with this short film: http://www.buzzfeed.com/marietelling/this-powerful-video-shows-men-what-it-feels-like-to-be-subje

The name of the short my friend linked to is "Oppressed Majority." It's an attempt at portraying gender role-reversal. While I won't impute motives to whoever wrote this, the impression that my friend got (and that was conveyed on the site that was linked to) was that this shows men what women face, that it's an eye-opener or whatever. And yeah, in that case, since women are a majority of the adult population, the title would indicate that it's actually the women that are oppressed in this story, but let's not get hung up on technicalities. Majority, minority: they both start with the same letter.

If the idea is to provide insight for clueless men on the plight of women everywhere, I'm not sure how this short is supposed to work toward that goal, on account of how any man that watches it will hate the main character and probably call him names or something. And while I can't support it with evidence, I'm convinced that is doubly true for women who aren't either feminists or who miss the not-so-subtle cues that this is what the short is about. If I actually thought that this was representative of the lives women lead (and by a long shot, I do not), I'd conclude that women are a bunch of big, stupid crybabies. I was going to cover all the details, but I should go to sleep instead, and I think the stupidity here is obvious enough that anyone who isn't already brainwashed to like this sort of crap would know what I'm going to say anyway.

And then there's this other thing. Tyler, I am going to kill you. Actually, I don't think Tyler reads this blog. In that case, I'm not really sure what to threaten him with. Well, I'm not going to comment on something that someone else, not one of my friends, posted on Facebook, even though it showed up when I went to Facebook after Tyler commented on it. I had started an overly polite comment, but I decided against it. Anyway, someone I don't know linked to this: http://thefeministwire.com/2013/06/why-do-white-guys-hate-my-hijab/

Tyler commented:

"Why do white guys..." The answer is because they're white guys.

I was initially going to try to be diplomatic about this. I had started typing something about how with all the myriad social and cultural factors in some setting that he's only hearing about third-hand, through the internet, the conclusion is a flippant "white guys." Whities gonna white, you know?

I'm coming up with all these ways, some tactful and some scathing, to address this. And I'm at a loss. All I can say right now is that I guess I expected better from my friend in this case, and apparently I was wrong to do that. Oh well. I sleep now.

The post that was going to be the third one on January 18th, but isn't

Yeah, I'd been planning to write three or more posts last Saturday, but that didn't happen. This would have been the third one. And now it's not. Anyway...

I've been thinking about how I should approach a certain issue. There's a popular site I visit almost daily. It's called "Facebook." You may have heard of it. No, I'm not writing blog posts about Facebook. Not quite, anyway. But I do see a lot of drivel posted on Facebook by Facebook friends. Sometimes I show up to debunk the stupidity, but I've been thinking about using this as my vehicle for such ranting instead.

The particular case that had me wanting to write about this on Saturday was a link to (and hearty agreement with) this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/why-are-childrens-books-are-still-about-white-boys_b_4227163.html

When I first read that, my inclination was to go through it, line by line, and explain in detail why the whole thing is disingenuous, stolid, and manipulative. I'm glad that I was distracted long enough to temper my annoyance, because doing that would be a giant waste of time.

In a far more egregious example, today I encountered a link, via Facebook, to this: http://www.upworthy.com/3-lies-about-food-youre-used-to-hearing-and-might-even-believe?c=tkp1

The Huffington Post and Upworthy. Of course, dammit. If you locked me in a room with the Huffington Post, Upworthy, and a rifle with only one bullet, I'd club the Huffington Post and Upworthy to death, break the door down, and shoot you for locking me in a room with the fucking Huffington Post and damn Upworthy. Yes, I realize they are websites and not individuals. Shut up. It's always the Huffington Post and Upworthy. I mean, it isn't really always them, but I've been desensitized to this crap from republicans, so they apparently don't count.

Sometimes I've responded directly to crap I see on Facebook. Sometimes I haven't. The idea I had on Saturday was to take to this blog as an alternative. There is also the option of simply doing nothing. Well, sometimes. At some point I'm going to vent...

Advantages to responding to drivel directly where I find it on Facebook

• The person who posted it can benefit from my vast wisdom. People won't know they're wrong if I never correct them!
• People can respond to what I've said, which creates discussion. Discussion is probably good.
• I'll be attacking my problems head-on, instead of retreating to my personal blog like some kind of reclusive lunatic.
• This presents a chance to belittle others. How could I pass that up?
• If people unfriend me on Facebook because I made them feel bad, I won't have to keep seeing the crap they post and I trim down my friends list in the process, something I've been meaning to do anyway. Victory in discourse, victory in future ventures to Facebook, and victory through getting other people to do part of my work for me. Triple success.
• People with genuine interest might see something I've written and actually learn from it. Keeping my wisdom hidden away is almost a crime.
• I might save someone else the trouble of having to debunk stupid shit. On rare occasions, someone has done that for me. I guess I'd be paying it forward.

And for responding to drivel here, rather than on Facebook, here are some counterpoints to the above

• The only people that see my debunking of drivel on Facebook at the friends of the individual that posted it in the first place. In contrast, anyone with the good sense to read my blog will catch everything I write here.
• I'd rather not waste all day arguing with morons.
• Well, I am some kind of reclusive lunatic. So there.
• I can belittle others here, and it's easier to do. Facebook can't truncate the things I type here, or hide them amid a wall of comments by other people.
• I like to be able to review what I've written in the past. Sometimes I spot flaws that I didn't notice at the time. If I spend a significant amount of time writing something that's going to be nearly impossible for me to find later, that's bad. Everything here is nice and tidy. Fuck Facebook.
• It's not about educating the masses. It's about whatever is most convenient for me personally.
• If I don't bother debunking crap, other people might be motivated to do so. I wouldn't want to take away their fun.

So yeah, this is quite the dilemma.

January 18th post #2: Cold Copper Tears by Glen Cook

Hey, it's the first book that I've read in 2014! I picked it up because I couldn't find much else that was small enough to comfortably lug around on buses and I liked Glen Cook well enough from the Black Company novels.

Having already gone through all ten Black Company novels before reading this makes me appreciate Glen Cook's skill as a writer. Cold Copper Tears is the third volume in the Garrett, P.I. series (which currently consists of 14 books). The idea is actually pretty simple: have a detective story (in the spirit of Raymond Chandler) set in a fantasy world with magic, elves, ogres, and such. The idea is interesting enough on its own and, at least in this one book, the execution is very good.

I liked the Black Company novels, but if the other books in this series are as good as Cold Copper Tears, then I'd favor it. This is a fun, witty book. I'm eager to read the rest of the series.

January 18th post #1: Star Surgeon by James White

I haven't updated this journal thing for a while. Rather than making one big post about everything I want to say now that I'm finally making an update, I've decided to do multiple posts on the same day. This was some sort of big deal back in my Livejournal days, but I can't remember the details.

At some point last year, shortly after graduating from college, I stopped reading altogether. I'd been in the habit of reading on buses and trains, sometimes getting so absorbed by my books that I'd finish them in binges rather than going to bed. Anyway, there was one more book that I read last year, around November and December. I didn't check it out from the library, so owning it let me read it over a more prolonged period.

My two favorite hobbies are science fiction and bad science fiction. I don't think I could pull off a terse explanation for the former, other than saying I think it's obvious why one should read science fiction. And if you don't, you're a nincompoop. But it's the latter that's the point of interest here. The classic, brilliant works of authors like Jack Vance and Frederik Pohl, both of whom died last year (with Pohl's death, I believe we've lost the last great author from the "Golden Age" of science fiction) have their obvious appeals, and maybe some not-so-obvious ones—they can stand on their own merits. Not every old science fiction book was actually so meritorious, and just because a story is bad does not mean that it can't survive to the present day, where I can procure it cheaply, sometimes for free.

I've reviewed bad science fiction before on this blog, although usually it was published in an anthology mixed in with good science fiction. This is something a little different. I picked up Star Surgeon and some other old paperbacks for free when I dropped by the library the day before their book sale and rummaged through a box of old books they were giving away (they were running out of room for books that could actually sell, so it was sort of a junk bin, I suppose). It's a 1981 reprint of a 1963 novel. This book is the second one in a series called "Sector General." It's about a space hospital, of course. Yes, that's right. A space hospital. In space. With space doctors. I know, right? It's incredibly silly and the plot moves in a way that makes the whole thing even sillier than I'm probably making it seem. And yet, some aspects of the writing are actually pretty good. Star Surgeon is corny and unconventional, but never so bad that it's irritating. And by walking that fine line, at least to someone that reads books the way I do, the experience is delightful. Throw in the fact that it's what's essentially what's been described as "pacifist space opera" and it's all rather bewildering. Sometimes I think Star Surgeon is so bad it's good, sometimes I think it's actually just good on its own, and most of the time I think it's so weird it's worthwhile, even if it's never truly great. I am definitely tempted to hunt down the rest of this series.

Matriarch Hestia

I forgot to make one of these posts for my latest Diablo II character to clear Hell. Another sorceress. This one is pretty much a cookie-cutter copy of a build by Clervis (the same person that pioneered the auradin I took to level 99): the Drop Bear.

Hestia has probably been my most dominant character so far. I can't think of much to say about her that I didn't already say in the thread I linked to. It's a good guide. If you've played Diablo II, you should check it out. The only problem is that I like Enchant so much and I'm not sure what else to do with the skill, as other enchantresses aren't likely to measure up to this insane setup. I'll definitely finish my crossbow enchantress though, and there are a couple of other options I might try after that.

Oh, I didn't even attempt a screenshot this time. I've given up on fixing whatever problem is preventing them from working.

More content on this blog? Not for a while, probably. I have other stuff to write this month. NaNoWriMo and all that. But I'll try to come up with something eventually.