For those who have too much time on their hands.
I’m apparently: ‘a laser hen’, or maybe I ‘share elan’, whilst Caroline is a ‘rascal heroine’.
Meanwhile ‘A future fair for all’ = ‘Our fearful fat liar’ who happens to be ‘born dog worn’.
Tag: Bits
Beware the Bottom Probes.
I remember, before I was taken on by Macmillan, getting cornered at a house party by a woman who, upon hearing that I wrote SF, wanted to talk to me about UFOs. I remember, when I was in my twenties, seeing something up in the sky out the back of my parent’s house: a sphere, silver on top and black underneath which, when I saw it, shot off at great speed. But now, I need to let you in on a secret: I don’t believe we have been visited by aliens.
I don’t believe flying saucers are playing peek-a-boo with airliners or having races with Airforce jets. I reckon that object I saw was a weather balloon caught in a high wind, or maybe, just maybe, it was some sort of military drone. I don’t believe a spaceship crashed at Area 57 and that the US military has some bug-eyed monsters on ice. I don’t believe the greys, with a technology capable of propelling themselves across a distance of a minimum of four light years, have come here to stick probes up the bottom of an Arkansas yokel.
You see, I’m a science fiction writer, which means I don’t buy into crap. I buy into logic, emphiricism. Crystals don’t heal, homeopathy is bunk, the only way anyone can predict the future by the stars is if that person sees a monster meteorite on a collision course with Earth. Faith is not proof; there is no invisible friend in the sky. Any theory that doesn’t adhere to Popper’s dictum is not a theory. A tin-foil hat will not stop the mind control rays from Alpha Centauri and walking under a ladder is only unlucky if someone drops a pot of paint on your head.
And these will maybe contain some interesting, rare or even unknown natural phenomena. They will contain delusions, sad attempts at attention seeking, lies, and maybe some truths about just how suggestible is the human mind. Sorry and all that.
Birthday Cards
Terry Pratchett's Dimbleby Lecture.
Temperance Month Over
So, for the health of our livers, Caroline and I spent this January drinking tea, coffee, juices and cordial only. This was after what the bansturbators in the BMA and nanny government would describe as excessive drinking, mainly because they made up the unit limits back in the 80s and have never bothered to change them.
Stopping drinking wasn’t a problem, in fact, we looked forwards to it, almost as if bored with it. We didn’t get any cravings and neither of us concealed any bottles of Vodka anywhere. The noticeable effect was a lack of hangovers and a tendency to sleep throughout the night, not wake up in the early hours. How it affected our health otherwise I don’t know – I had a cold throughout most of January so couldn’t really tell.
Last night we cracked a bottle of red wine and shared it. Did I really enjoy it having been abstinent for so long? Not really. It seemed watery, tea would have been better, and we finished the bottle more as a matter of form than because we were relishing it. I don’t think I’m going to bother with it much now. I’ll have a drink on my birthday tomorrow, and I’ll toast my brother at his wake on the 8th. Of course I rather think that the chilled carafe of wine down by our local beach on Crete is going to be a different matter…
Hooders.
I was looking for some simple way to illustrate what a hooder looks like and came up with some handy ideas. Take a human spine and graft a horseshoe crab on the end of it, and you’re about there. I mean, take a look at this and imagine it ten times bigger and slamming down on top of you.
Also, whilst looking at human spines, I found this. Just remove the pelvis and the light bulb and you’ve got the general shape of a hooder.
Righto, I’ve just finished working backwards through The Technician and am now further tidying, also writing those chapter starts: ‘How It Is — by Gordon’, ‘From a Speech by Jobsworth’ etc.
Little Story
Here’s one from Max Thompson who joined up on my FaceBook site:
I also have a tale of synchronicity involving one of your books.
I was living in Kuala Lumpur a few years ago and Hilldiggers has just been released. I could not get it anywhere and was mightily disappointed as wanted to take it on a trip to Langkawi to read on the beach. On arriving at the aforementioned island after settling myself in I went for walk along the seafront and came across a flea market. Bugger me if the wasn’t a 2nd hand copy sitting there on a book stall for about 5 ringit !! The only English book in sea of German bodice rippers. I was the happiest bloke alive and you have never seen a anybody get their wallet out so fast.
I’ve seen by books right round the other side of the world, plenty of them in New Zealand and I even signed a wall in a bookshop there, but it is nice to find out where else they appear.
Who Reads My Books? Graeme Finch
IT server hardware engineer on site, RFS Qualified but no longer practising Arborist (Tree Surgeon), one time lifegaurd (swimming pool variety). Grounds and terminal maintenance person at London City Airport when it first opened, cutting grass on the runway, painting terminal lounges and the like so dignitaries could get their fix of emulsion smell. One time mechanical and electrical maintenance estimator for the UK’s (then) largest facilities maintenance company, all these fields look random but are each connected by that six degrees of separation rule, what employment agencies call transferable skills.
I scuba dived extensively in my early twenties, and read the Godwhale and Cachalot for the first time during this period. I do a fair bit of walking, swimming and cycling, I read as much historical fiction as I do science fiction and have trawled through some Dickins. I will read Moby Dick this year and have tackled both the Illiad and Odessy both original translations and novelised versions and Dan Simmons Illium series that takes the themes of the Illiad and incorporates them into a far flung future and our very own past as well as a parallel universe (or two). The classics offer us a window on the past, attitudes to life and death, towards each other and reflect in some ways what was socially cohesive or topical at the time (a bit like climate change, and over population today). Neal’s own references to strong diseases and weak humans in Cowl will if we are unlucky prove to be one of those Scfi “cos that’s wot’l appen” moments some time down the line.
The first series of books I read were the Amtrak Wars by Patrick Tilley, before that I’d been a reluctant reader, after that I couldn’t get enough. My favourite book of all time is The Silmarillion by Tolkien, closely followed by The Lord of the Rings. I’m currently reading the Seven Suns Saga by some bloke called Kevin J Anderson, who I’d not heard of but is apparently a notable in StarWars circles and Co wrote some Dune books (I’ve only read Dune, it was brilliant), I’m struggling with the first book of the series because I feel a bit patronised by it, though it has some good stuff in it. I’ve read a good few Stephen Kings, Dean Koontz and Brian Lumley books. And down the years I’ve read countless odds and sods, from detective novels that were the only thing avaiable when I had a long stay in hospital when I was eighteen, to erotic fiction with some rampant bird I met during my divorce (I needed help maintaining my hormone levels at overdrive, though to be fair she wore me out and then gave me the Spanish archer treatment “El Bow”).
I have a hard back copy of Orbus which I’ll be reading next (though to be fair I can’t abide hardbacks), they don’t fit in my backpack pockets and take up too much room, and if they do go in the pack they invariably get damp damage because they share space with my swimming gear.
I Have a broad understanding of Particle physics, Cosmology, Theory of relativity and many other subjects science related. In part through science fiction and that nagging bit of the brain that says “is that actually plausible”? I’m curious, about the very massive and the very small and how if you could stand on an atom and look out through the rest of a cell at all the other atoms in the human body (for instance). Would the specs of light look like the stars in our galaxy and would the distances be relative. Then you take that idea out to the size of a planet and get your head around how far our nearest neighbour planet is, then our largest planet neighbour, then the next nearest galaxy and so forth.
Science fiction, generally makes you optimistic (I think) (someone I know of disagrees), though sometimes it makes you wish you were born in a couple of hundred years time. I also think older science fiction is a great gauge of what we imagined and what has now been realised (see line above).
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
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).