I’m going to separate up Vaude’s collection into three or four posts since it’s so huge.
Tag: People
vaudeviewgalor raandisisraisins' book collection.
You Can Contribute.
Here’s just a little reminder for everyone, and some information for new members here: If you delve into the history of this blog you’ll find a number of ways you can contribute.
The bookmarks competition finishes on New Year’s Day. Design me some bookmarks that use the Jon Sullivan artwork and display the eddress of this blog and you could be the winner of some signed copies. The winner gets the Cormac series and the Spatterjay series (new covers), second place gets the Spatterjay series, whilst the top three additionally get copies of my books that they haven’t got in their collection … oh, and when I say that, I mean any of the Macmillan books – all signed of course.
I’ve been running a series of profiles and still want contributions. The title was ‘Who Reads My Books?’ For anyone who is interested, I’d like a short biography and some photographs of you. Tell me about yourself, advertise if you want, if you have a blog or a website of your own then let me know. Thus far (if my recollection is right) we have plenty of IT guys, a pilot, a geneticist, writers, a composer, jewellery maker and much more besides. But don’t be intimidated by these – I want to know about YOU and your interests. Remember, before I got where I am now I used to cut grass for a living.
It’s also interesting to see photos of people’s SFF collections. I enjoy having a look at them and so do many of those who come here. Let’s have a look!
Send your photographs etc here ndotasheratvirgindotnet
Finally, I’ll shortly be doing another video clip to post up here so I would like some more questions. I’ll answer as many of these as I can within the 10 minutes allowed (You Tube) then carry over what’s left to the next clip. Post your questions in the comments section here.
The Aliens Are Here.
Y’know, there are lots of conspiracy theories running around the world – the moon landings were falsified, alien spacecraft in AREA 51 – but I’m here to tell you now that one of them is true: there are aliens amongst us. If you were to split open a particular shiny forehead that’s been prominent on your TVs and in your newspapers you would reveal the green lizard skin of glombulfrog from the planet Zaarg. Cameron is not alone, of course, glombulfrogs have taken control of all the parliaments and senates across the world, because nothing else could possibly explain their deep disconnect from real human beings.
It is a conspiracy to give us the worst possible rulers, to fuck up our financial systems, blow our money on complete rubbish, involve us in pointless wars, control and dictate, nanny and generally leave us so totally and utterly pissed off with them. The purpose of this is quite simple. When, in about ten years, the invasion arrives and the particle beams lash down, turning the House of Commons to rubble, the White House to a smoking ruin, the European Parliament to a bomb site snowed with the pages from burning accounts books, we’ll all cheer. When the glombulfrogs stride out of their massive space ships and tell us that they are now in charge, there will be a collective worldwide sigh of relief and cries of, ‘Thank fuck for that.’
The latest Cameroonism is a perfect example of how they work:
‘Hey, the country is in huge debt, people are worried about their finances, worried about the massive amounts of money we’re blowing, so how can we hack them off further?’ he asked at a recent glombulfrog focus group.
‘I know,’ a climber in the frog hierarchy answered, ‘let’s spend some money on something completely needless and pointless just like our agents in the previous government did. That always seemed to work.’
‘Ahah,’ said the Camerofrog, ‘let’s do a happiness consultation and spend, I dunno, a couple of million.’
‘Only a couple of million?’
‘Well, we can’t get too drastic – the main invasion fleet won’t arrive for another ten years.’
‘Very true – we do actually need something left to rule.’
Freeman Dyson
This article is pretty well-balanced for the New York Times, and very interesting. This particular paragraph had me chuckling:
At Jason, taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.” The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.
And this comment got to me too:
His older sister Alice, a retired social worker still living in Winchester, remembers how her brother “used to lie on the nursery floor working out how many atoms there were in the sun. He was perhaps 4.”
Dyson is a genius, but also a contrary and original thinker and, it seems, of a kind that we just don’t see so many of now. Where are the upcoming people like Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer and Bethe now? I wonder why we don’t see them? Maybe something to do with politicized consensus science? Being brilliant and original doesn’t really work in the groupthink that so much science has become.
Gridlinked Film.
And the last post reminds me of this, unearthed from deep in this blog where posts are fossilizing, I was an angrier man, the world had less shades of grey, ad nauseum…
Cameron Dadd is an eighteen-year-old freelance graphic designer who lives in the most isolated city on our planet. He does have a small collection, but it’s as yet unavailable online, however, there’s Leviathan here: http://sharpendofreason.deviantart.com/ which, inspired by Cameron’s work, was created by a good friend of his called Carlo – looks like something Dragon put together!
(Of course Cameron is no longer 18, and who knows if this website is still current)
A Couple of Greats
I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before, but Frederick Pohl has a blog, as does Jerry Pournelle.
Family History
We took a wander up to Chatteris a week ago, stopped in a pub called The Cross Keys, then sloped back to Soham to do some research into Caroline’s family history. (Of course the latter place is famous for somewhat nastier events than being the breeding ground of the Sizer family. I did wonder about a rather odd look I got when I asked about the location of a particular graveyard) This research generally involved clumping about graveyards checking the names on tombstones, checking the names on a war memorial, then drinking beer and eating bacon and egg baguettes. Here’s a couple of pictures from the area. First off The Cross Keys itself:
Next the well-guarded door to our room:
Caroline’s parents got the better bed!
One of our hunting grounds:
One of our finds (Sizer):
The Fountain – location of those wonderful baguettes, and where we wished we had stayed:
Who Reads My Books? Daniel Ware.
Ok so I finally got my thumb out of my bum and wrote something coherent (well almost) for you, Neal…
My name is Dan and I am 31 years old, married with a 2 1/2 year old son who I named Gaius after Gaius Baltar in new Battlestar Galactica (hopefully he won’t grow up and destroy our society, though)
I am currently an Export Manager at a small fuel company, after doing stints working in IT for HSBC and then the MET/Essex Police as a project manager, before coming to my senses and getting out of the latter before the bureaucracy and political meddling drove me completely insane. I did actually come from a science background, my youthful obsession with dinosaurs turning into a Degree in Palaeobiology and Evolution after University, but sadly there are no jobs in hard science fields these days not already taken by entrenched minds and beings…
I guess I have my mother to thanks for my interest in Science Fiction – she is a big Alan Dean Foster fan – so I read a lot of his stuff from a young age (Cachalot and Sentenced to Prism being ones I remember). I never really left science fiction, though my continued interest in hard science meant most of my time was spent reading journals throughout my teens and 20s, so I dropped a lot of literature, coming back to it eventually several years ago.
I am also a keen gamer – rarely watching TV these days (since BSG went down the tube in season 3 I haven’t watched anything except The Shield and the odd Fringe episode), but thankfully there are plenty of science fiction games to be had these days – Mass Effect 2 being a standout for any science fiction nut.
As for Neal’s stuff, well I often looked at the cover of Line of Polity in my local Waterstones not long after it came out, but it was actually after I read Peter Hamilton’s awesome Pandora’s Star that I actually snatched up Gridlinked looking in desperation for something similar, and never looked back. Reading Gridlinked I was blown away by the quality of the writing and science fiction and I immediately went back and bought as many as I could in the same shop (including that copy of Line of Polity which I enjoyed even more).
After that, well there’s no looking back I guess – found Neal’s site, went to his signing in Lakeside (which he probably remembers as I dragged my wife and son along and we were the first ones there) and then went out for beers with the man himself at the next signing in London.
To date my favourite book is still probably Prador Moon, closely followed by all of the Polity series – it really defines how I think about science fiction now, the fact that I’ve met Neal and discussed it all in person is the absolute awesome sauce on top.
Well finally I guess, I do run a blog: http://jebelkrong.blogspot.com/ which focuses a lot on gaming, but I do post the occasional bit of Asher news and the odd review (but nothing like Walker of Worlds site, which is awesome, btw) – just something to keep me sane at work more than anything, but I like it!
If anyone games on XBL, my gamertag is, yep: Jebel Krong; and you will currently find me playing the hell out of Mass effect 2 most nights!
Regards
Dan
p.s. I can’t submit a photo of my book collection because I still don’t have a bookcase. I keep them all in boxes, as between kids and life, a nice bookcase is always at the bottom of the priority list… *sigh* maybe this year…
Lesley Pearse
One day when I was scrabbling around for something to read, Caroline handed me a book and told me I might enjoy it. Looking at the design of the cover I thought, ‘Mmm, a woman’s book’ but nevertheless gave it a go. It was Remember Me by Lesley Pearse, and I enjoyed it very much. This was the story of Mary Broad, a woman who survived transportation to Australia and a life it would be an understatement to call grim — a story turned into a TV production you might have seen (but not based on the book).
Recently Caroline picked up on the fact that, through the Essex Book Festival, Lesley Pearse would be giving a talk at South Woodham Ferrers library, which is just a ten minute drive away from us. She wanted to go and so did her mother, Myrtle, who is also a fan.
I’ve enjoyed these things before like, for example, when we went to listen to Martina Cole at Maldon library and she entertained us with stories about her work for Social Services. One other highlight of that visit was the righteous frown one of the staff gave us because we wanted to go outside for a cigarette, where we were joined by another smoker in the room, a blond-haired lady by the name of Martina Cole. So, even though I’d only read one Lesley Pearse book, I signed up too.
The talk she gave was good, kept us welded to our seats for an hour and could have continued for longer with no objection. I had to chuckle at some of the anecdotes. How, as a wannabe writer, would you feel about presenting a book to the agent Darley Anderson, having a meal with him and then, afterwards, him dropping the manuscript on the table and saying, “This is rubbish, but you can write – go away and write another one.” She did, book after book, and just like me had a number of books completed before she was ever published. In fact there were a lot of things she said whose familiarity I had a wry chuckle at.
If you get a chance to hear her speak she’s definitely worth the ticket price.