Um, lovely stuff.
Category: Articles
The Iron Scorpion.
Thanks to Martin Sommerfeld for sending me this. He tells me: Since you like to post new covers of your books in your blog, I included this high-res version I found online at www.bol.de It pales in comparison to Sullivan’s work, but I still think the new line of covers for your German books is a huge improvement to the old ones before 2009.
They translated the title “Shadow of the Scorpion” as “The iron Scorpion”, which sounds ok in German, but the literal translation would have worked too, so no idea why they changed it.
Avatar Review
There are some spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen the film, don’t read this. Simples…
This was visually gorgeous. Superb, astounding special effects and three-dee that generally made things clearer and managed to impart a sense of scale I’d never before seen in a film. That first zero gravity scene with the arriving humans leaving their hibernation pods had me gob-smacked. There were jungle scenes later where I occasionally moved my head aside to stop getting whipped in the face by some plant, and there were other scenes when you felt you could reach out and touch something on the screen. A slight disconnect between the size of the aliens and the humans – I was constantly surprised when an arrow shot from a Na’vi bow arrived the size of a spear to impale a human, but that might be due to mental assumptions on my part, generally because the Na’vi were too human. Also when both humans and avatars were together in the human base that didn’t quite work. Small points, irrelevant points – I’ve never seen effects done so well.
The alien life was excellent too. I particularly liked the hyena-like creatures our hero had to defend himself from during his first night on the planet, and the lizard that took off like fluorescent helicopter, and the plants (animals?) retracting their parts into the ground like tubeworms. I did, however, feel that the visual gorgeousness was taken a little to far into fairy-light territory and half expected to see a glowing Santa Claus crouching on one of the branches. And there also seemed to be a bit of a disconnect: why was it all the mammal-like creatures had six legs whilst the Na’vi were bipeds? Well, I can let that go – insects share our world and have six legs too. Just another small point, really.
But then we get to the story itself. I won’t go with the disparaging ‘Dances with Smurfs’, this was, as others have noted, ‘Dances with Aliens’. In fact it wasn’t even that because, really, the Na’vi were too human. They were Indians, American Indians with a touch of African native or maybe Aborigine tossed into the mix, but they were also so much less than that. Not run-o-the-mill Indians these, but noble savages and the realization of that myth of natives living in harmony with Mother Nature, who herself has been turned into a living force the natives could plug into without using mescaline. These were the anti-thesis of nature-raping evil capitalist imperialists and were not the dead before forty, one child in four surviving, eat grubs and be happy natives that we know.
The sheer joy of the visual effects was degraded by the large green mallet regularly smacking me in the forehead. Earth is no longer green, we are told. Humans can splice alien and human DNA and grow hybrid avatars, they can travel between the stars, but apparently growing plants is beyond them. Obviously Earth has been raped by the corporates who have now gone to the stars to rape other worlds for the allegorical unobtanium. Big mistake on Pandora, however, because between their first encounter with the human military and their second, the Na’vi apparently invented armour-piercing arrows, whilst the humans neglected to consider the utility of dropping a rock on them from orbit.
Sigh.
There are those who are speculating that Avatar cost near on half a billion dollars. So, half a billion on special effects, wages for actors and others, on marketing, all of that, so couldn’t they have just spent a bit more on the story? My feeling, after wards: huge talent and astounding effects wasted on a clumsy and shallow parable. Such a shame.
Update: But in the end, what the fuck do I know? I’ve just been told by someone on the inside that Avatar has done 1.4 billion in just a few weeks.
Who Reads My Books? Sean Price.
In response to your “Who reads my books” post.
This all sort of makes me feel like a fanboy, but then again…I guess I am. 🙂
Occupation: I’m a former carpenter turned software engineer. I’m going to take a guess and say that the majority of your readers are educated professions in a tech field. 🙂
I’ve been an avid reader since 4th grade and I still remember my first SF book (Red Planet by Robert Heinlein). I was quite heavily into hard sci-fi for a while (Niven, Clarke…) and then drifted more toward the other end of the spectrum (notably Zelazny). If I look at my bookshelf I see I pretty much have an A-Z collection, in spite of the fact that I clean it out periodically and donate to my local library. I recently got a Kindle and I find I read more now. It’s that whole “instant access” thing.
At this point in my life I don’t really have a specific genre I typically read as I’ll pick up anything that I feel might be good. Some of my current favorite authors would be (in no particular order), Stephen Brust, Jim Butcher, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, George R.R.Martin, Christopher Moore and some guy named Neal Asher. It’s actually gotten much easier to find “good” books (and authors) these days due to sites like Amazon and their inclusion of reader reviews. I’ve found that, (like movies), if a book has 300 reviews and they’re all 5 stars, chances are it’s pretty good. (which doesn’t account for books by Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker but still….)
Location: I live in the US. Specifically, in Hawaii. (Island of Oahu, but thinking of moving to the Big Island) http://tinyurl.com/yafn3g2
Hobbies: Triathlons, Ultramarathons, Mountain Biking, Scuba Diving, Swimming and other non-team sports that get me outside. I also like drinking (good) beer. Feel free to let me know when you’re on this side of the pond(s) and I’ll drink a pint with you. 🙂
Pictures: You didn’t specify pictures of “what”, so I’ve attached 3 random pics. (Myself, my dog and cat and a hiking trail on the Big Island). I will leave it to you to figure out which is which.
— Sean
F is for Farmer and Foster.
PHILIP JOSE FARMER | THE STONE GOD AWAKENS TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO THE FABULOUS RIVERBOAT THE DARK DESIGN THE MAGIC LABYRINTH GODS OF RIVERWORLD RIVERWORLD & OTHER STORIES THE WORLD OF TIERS |
RAYMOND E FIEST | DAUGHTER OF EMPIRE |
ALAN DEAN FOSTER | INTO THE OUT OF NOR CRYSTAL TEARS CACHALOT SENTENCED TO PRISM THE MAN WHO USED THE UNIVERSE THE TAR-AIYM KRANG VOYAGE TO THE CITY OF THE DEAD ICERIGGER |
ROBERT WILFRED FRANSON | THE SHADOW OF THE SHIP |
The Technician
First draft of The Technician completed at 140,000 words (about the length of Brass Man). Now I’ve got to trim off the sticky out bits, tighten up the weave, read it backwards, forwards, sideways and hanging from a light fitting and edit until I reach the point where reading another word of it makes me want to smash up my keyboard with my forehead.
Who Reads My Books? Mark Dennehy.
Mark Dennehy started his career as a delivery boy at Don Corleone’s pizza parlour until the day he used a pizza knife to carve up an irate customer … no no, stop it Neal. Over to Mark:
I mostly do network programming on unix these days for a pre-startup company, though I spent a few years before now working on website stuff for various companies (PHP programming, database stuff and lots of sysadmin work). Before that it was a PhD (which remains unfinished) on applying nonlinear mathematics to localisation and mapping in robotics. Before that I was working on a PhD on teleautonomous control of bomb disposal robots, but a german group (their equivalent of the US NEST group) beat me to publication and then proceeded to publish all over me 😀 I also lecture in embedded systems.
For hobbies, I do a lot of Olympic target shooting, I cook, and I fool about writing code and at the moment I’m mulling over whether or not to build another micromouse robot after watching this one solve a maze in under five seconds in last year’s all-japan championships.
I tend to read pretty much everything – as far as I know, I’m the youngest person to have read every book in the library in the town I grew up in, and I did that again when we moved towns. I’ve been reading science fiction since I was ten, starting with authors like Asimov and Clarke and Niven and progressing over the years to KSR, Banks, yourself, Haldeman, Brin, Reynolds, Stross and so on. Of late I’ve been reading more and more UK based hard scifi (I have far more fun reading it when the math works) because the UK stuff has a far more ingrained trend of looking at human behaviour pessimistically. In US hard scifi, the scientific math works; in the better UK stuff, both the scientific math and the economic math works, and there are far fewer idealistic characters (which is not the same thing as characters who have ideals). It’s a bit muckier, basicly. I don’t tend to read too much outside of science fiction anymore, and with the sole exception of Pratchett, never really found the fantasy genre to be able to hold my interest at all (likewise with crime, horror, and pretty much all the general fiction out there at the moment).
Personal favorites have changed over the years, but some have stayed in the top ten for years now. Stross’s riff on the lovecraftian universe with the Laundry, as well as Accelerando; Bank’s Culture novels especially The Player of Games; the Polity novels; KSR’s Red Mars (once the colony’s established, it gets a bit tedious); Vinge’s A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky; Cherryh’s Union/Alliance novels, especially Cyteen (I’m in the middle of its sequel Regenesis right now), and a few others.
Non-fiction works are about all I read outside of SF these days, whether they be general nonfiction (the latest include The Whale and the Reactor which I heartily recommend you not waste money buying and which is the first book in many years that I threw in the bin, as well as Big Brain which is a bit basic but is one of the few books out there that covers the Boskops and if you’ve never heard of them, go google them now for a bit of a braintwist — at least until you read the mainstream anthropological view), or cookery books (Blumenthal and Brown are worth reading even if you don’t like to cook), or professional development stuff (The Pragmatic Programmer, GUI development with PyQT, and the like).
Who Reads My Books? Andy Chaytor.
Next one in the rogues’ gallery:
Hi Neal, I work in a bank – as you can probably guess from my web address. It’s my job, amongst others, to work out what is going on with markets and how clients – pension funds, asset managers, hedge funds and government entities – should be positioned. It’s been a fun couple of years as I’m sure you can imagine!! I started doing this 6 years ago having got a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University.
Reading-wise my passions are sci-fi first and foremost but also I enjoy crime novels – especially Agatha Christie; what I look for from a book is some level of escapism. The point about a good book, I think, is that it allows your mind to escape when you are reading it AND when you are not, as you mull over the ideas and thoughts that have been presented to you. That’s what makes you my favourite author – more than anyone else I have ever read, your books (the concepts and thoughts within them) stay with me long, long after I have finished reading.
Keep up the good work!!
Andy
Orbus Paperback Cover
Who Reads My Books? Matthew Reece Ford
A while ago I chatted to a guy called Matthew Reece Ford via either Face Book, this blog, or somewhere else. He is fan of my books and noting I live near Chelmsford wondered if I’d be on for a beer the next time he came down to visit his brother. I pointed out that though Chelmsford is in my postal address I don’t actually live there, but in a village some 13 miles away. Turns out that village is precisely where his brother lives. I couldn’t see him last year, when this conversation took place, but since he was down here this Christmas I said why not, and met him in the local for a pint. “So what do you do?” I asked. “I’m a scientist,” he replied.
It’s this meeting, and others like it (many in the virtual world) that’s led me to a little idea for a few posts here. I’m fascinated to know who reads my books, and in this case quite tickled when it turns out that whilst I dream about the future there are those who read my books who are actually making it.
I have been an avid reader for over 3 decades. Favourite newer authors: David Gunn, Tony Ballantyne, Neal Asher, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F Hamilton, Greg Egan, Robert Reed, Richard Morgan, Charles Stross, Robert A Metzger, Chris Moriarty. Favourite classic authors: Clarke, Asimov, Brin, Baxter, Stapleton, Silverburg, Wyndham
BSc Biochemistry (with sandwich year, worked at Celltech in Slough for a full year) at Canterbury 1990-1994. PhD Biochemistry at Canterbury and Leicester (1994-1998).
Employed 1999 to present at Cobra BioManufacturing, as a senior scientist.
Employed 1999 to present at Cobra BioManufacturing, as a senior scientist.
At Cobra I have worked on viruses (adenovirus, lentivirus, reovirius), proteins (for treatment of a variety of disorders, such as anti-transplant rejection proteins and monoclonal antibodies) and plasmid DNA (for vaccines) at large scale. All inside our clean rooms for phase I and II clinical trials.
Now, to continue this, I’d like to hear from other readers. I’d like you to tell me about yourselves for posts like this one. Don’t be intimidated by the qualifications of the guy above, and remember that until 2001 I was still cutting grass and hedges and strimming dogshit!
And here’s Matt’s book collection:
