I give you Buckethead.
Books: Friday Roundup
05/29/2009 By Leave a Comment
I’ve got bacon in my belly, a book on my lap and some blankets on my legs. Life is good.
So good, in fact, I almost forgot to write up this week’s Friday Roundup. Gasp! We can’t let that happen now, can we?
So without further ado we present this week’s (admittedly) small list.
The Stand, Stephen King. Yup, it’s the book readers either love or hate. King’s epic novel about a post apocalyptic world struggling to get by in the wake of a deadly virus that killed off 99.6% of mankind.
Love it, hate it, whatever. At least we can all agree on one thing — at 1,000+ pages, this book is a freakin’ behemoth.
Not that that is really a bad thing. Like King says in the introduction, one could tell the story of Hansel and Gretel in a paragraph, but where’s the fun in that? The life of a story is in the details, man. And The Stand has details galore.
I’m only a little over 300 pages in so as of right now I can’t say yet whether I fall into the “loved it” or “hated camp.” I’m a huge fan of King’s short fiction, “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” (F&SF October/November 2008), being one of my favorite stories of the past year, but the jury’s still out on whether the epic scale of The Stand is going to leave me feeling satisfied or really, really drained.
If nothing else, I will say that King’s writing does make for great summertime reading. And despite the fact that The Stand took about 200 pages to really get rolling, I’ll tenatively say that I’m falling more into the “loved it” camp, at least for now, anyway.
(UPDATE: I finished this over the summer. I loved it. What’s that? You hated it? OK, cool. Move along.)
“The Motorman’s Coat,” John Kessel (F&SF, June/July 2009) - In a world without coats, one man …
No seriously, that’s the premise. Two hundred or so years into the future all the cool kids are chasing after relics from earth’s renaissance and industrial ages to show off how awesome they are at being awesomely wealthy. One man specializes in procuring said items, but when business begins to falter, he takes it upon himself to save his shop of forgotten sundries by purchasing a Checzh motorman’s coat crafted in 1911. Said purchase stirs the town into a frenzy, but *gasp* the sale may not be all that it seems. There’s also an awkward love plot sandwiched in there somewhere.
I really didn’t get this story. The plot, while mildly interesting all fell apart under what I considered to be a terribly underwhelming conclusion. I dunno, pick it up if you’re a fan of speculative coat fiction, I guess. Does that genre even exisit? Probably.
“Corona Centurion™ FAQ,” Terry Bisson (F&SF, June/July 2009) - Bisson’s Q&A piece is too short for me to describe in any detail without spoiling, but suffice it to say it reminded me very much of Ruth Nestvold’s “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide.” And since that story was nominated for a Nebula Award this year, I’d say Bisson’s story is in good company. Concise and punchy, “FAQ” left me wanting more — a lot more, actually …
Science: Warp bubbles – ‘Star Trek’ becoming reality?
05/27/2009 By Leave a Comment
The good news is two U.S. scientists claim they’ve found a way to travel faster than the speed of light.
The bad news is we may have to sacrifice Jupiter to get the energy to do it.
The link to the article can be found over at ABC News, but the trick basically works like this: Scientists would need to create a warp bubble by manipulating dark energy and the 11th dimension. Simple, right?
Hardly.
But the idea jives with physics, at least theoretically speaking.
See the problem with faster than light (FTL) travel is that according to Einstein (who’s pretty much the go-to-guy for this stuff) it can’t be done.
According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, any object — be it a planet or a speck of dust — requires an infinite amount of energy to reach light speeds.
There’s one problem with that idea though — since the 1970s scientists have observed the very universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.
So what gives?
In recent years, scientists have pinned dark matter as the culprit, saying this mysterious (and presumably massless) substance is somehow propelling our universe’s expansion at warp speeds.
So by manipulating this material, scientists suspect objects in our universe could, in effect, ride a dark matter “wave” to faster-than-light (FTL) speeds. Much like a surfer rides a wave at the beach.
All we’d have to do is create a massless dark matter bubble and piggyback inside that through the universe.
Thus, FTL travel falls in line with Einstein’s theory of relativity and everyone’s happy, right?
Well, maybe not.
The amount of energy needed to manipulate dark matter and create a warp bubble is would be nothing short of phenomenal. Roughly on par with the total mass of Jupiter, scientists say. And that’s just the initial kick. To keep the ship moving through space, more and more energy would be required.
There’s also the theory’s reliance on string theory, which is unproven at best and a theory many physicists are decrying at a misguided “theory of everything” that will be disproved in the coming decades.
So, right now at least, the world of Star Trek seems to be pretty far off.
But theoretically, the idea of zipping to distant star systems does seem possible. And that’s good news for all us science fiction fiends.
I haven’t vanished …
05/26/2009 By Leave a Comment
… although it feels like I’ve been split into multiple time continuums.
Busy, busy, busy as of late. Many deadlines. But, busy means money, so hey, no complaints.
I’ll be back in full form tomorrow, guys.
Books: Friday Roundup
05/22/2009 By Leave a Comment
This week we have two short stories featured in the June 2009 issue of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact and a recommendation for one of my favorite authors.
Monuments of Unageing Intellect, Howard V. Hendrix - I liked it. It’s a play on the whole “If we were immortal would we pine to be mortal?” question, but it’s a good one. Hendrix succeeds in connecting the ideas of immortality with the timelessness of artistic genius and he paints some pretty beautiful scenes while doing it. I’m not too familiar with Hendrix’s work as a writer, but after reading this story I think I want to be.
The Affair of the Phlegmish Master, Donald Moffitt - A fun and interesting story advancing the question of what the super rich would do if the very fabric of space and time was their playground. Moffitt’s speculation: spend lavishly on commissioned paintings from the world’s most legendary artists. Probably not too far off. But are the paintings of these alternate artists “true” works? Is the beauty of an object derived from the object alone or the soul and essence of the artist invested in it? Moffitt juggles all these questions against a jaunty dialogue between three persons who travel back in time to hire out the services of the famed Dutch baroque artist Johannes Vermeer. Probably my favorite read of the week.
Recommendation of the week: Ilium/Olympos by Dan Simmons
If you’ve read any of Simmons’s books, you know they are a commitment.
But they’re nearly always worth it. The Ilium/Olympos cantos is no exception. In the 1000+ pages that the two novels span, Simmons paints a fascinating alternate reality pitting humans against the divine and sets the conflict against a remarkably vibrant interstellar backdrop. Part Greek myth, part space opera and part historical fiction, these are the two books that could stand up as Simmons’s defining work. Essential reading for any fan of the space opera genre. Bonus points if you’re a classics buff — you’ll fall in love with his depictions of the old Greek heroes and his humorous portrayal of the gods.
Movies: Shane Acker’s ’9′
05/20/2009 By Leave a Comment
Perhaps you’ve seen the trailer for Shane Acker’s full-length feature, 9, but it’s below if you haven’t.
Wow, all I can say is it looks awesome.
9 is based on Acker’s award-winning 11 minute short, which premiered at the Sundance film festival in 2005. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. Now.
The film won numerous awards including the gold medal at the Student Academy Awards, “Best in Show” at the 2005 SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater and it was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.
Producers include Acker, Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov and Jim Lemley. The movie will flesh out the stories of the film’s nine sentient rag dolls, who inhabit a post-apocalyptic world and are hunted by a band of soul-sucking mechanical beasts.
The release date’s been set for Sept 9, 2009. This trailer, courtesy of Focus Features, premiered on G4′s Attack of the Show Tuesday, May 19.
Space: I really need to go outside more …
05/20/2009 By Leave a Comment
Maybe I’ll see stuff like this.
Courtesy of William Castleman, a Texas based photographer who replaced the stock lens on his Canon EOS5-D with a red lens filter allowing him to capture the rising core of the Milky Way.
Spectacular.
Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.
Internet: Unplugging in the Information Age
05/19/2009 By Leave a Comment
In about three years, I’ve watched 4,726 videos on YouTube.
But wait, it gets worse.
The 4,726 views (which isn’t really that outrageous, is it?) are relegated to one measly account.
I’ve probably got about half a dozen user names on there — and they’ve all got ludicrously high statistics too, I’m sure.
Only meta-consciousness in charge of the Net knows exactly how much time I’ve whittled away on that damn site. Thankfully, he’s not talking.
That’s good news. Because honestly, if I saw hard numbers telling me how much time I’ve spent surfing YouTube, I’d probably swear off the Net forever. And we can’t have that, can we?
Of course not. We’re members of Generation Y, the folks who’ve taken ownership of the Internet and transformed it into a new forum for American culture. I take my life 140 characters at a time, thank you very much.
But maybe we shouldn’t be thinking like this.
When Google CEO Eric Schmidt begs us to meet real people and go outside, it might be time to listen.
“Our goal is to have you be as attached as possible,” Schmidt said. “But know where the off button is. It’s possible to spend your life inside the computer.
These tools are enormously powerful. Use them, then turn them off. . . . Life is the people around you. Talk to them.”
Earlier this month, the LA Times filed an interesting piece on the so-called “Blackberry Babies” — tracking a group of teenagers who went without cell phones and iPods.
The week felt like a lifetime.
“I can’t stand it,” [10th-grader] Cesar Rodriguez wrote in his journal on the second day of a one-week attempt to survive without television, iPods, cellphones, BlackBerrys and computers. “I woke up last night but I was still kind of asleep and I was having a dream about my phone and I started to bang my head against the pillow. I AM GOING CRAZY!!!”
The article continues …
Andres Lopez told me he’d been so bored he went to a barber and had his shaggy locks shorn, “Just to fill the void.”
Jose Alvarez said he had tried Pilates and something even more exotic: “I cleaned my room.”
Mario Canaba was turned so upside down, he actually played with some of his mother’s day-care kids, but described the experience in a single word: “Painful.”
Angie Gaytan lost track of the days and had a strange episode of disorientation in which she found herself staring at a piece of chicken.
“I felt weird and out of order,” Valerie Lira wrote in describing the experience of waking up and not turning on the television.
Rodriguez, confessing the media fast was “the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” drank a lot of water, like a man trying to make it across a desert. At his lowest point, trying desperately to kill time, he accidentally broke a lamp.
“I was playing soccer in my living room,” he said.
But hey, at least the kids were being creative. They actually started pursuing some new hobbies. One even took notice of the adventuresome world found right in her own backyard …
Daniel Romero read a book for the first time this year.
Lopez actually communicated with an uncle during a rare conversation about swine flu, politics and history.
Jenny Corona connected with her autistic brother, and, to her utter amazement, read an entire Harry Potter book in four days.
Without her headphones blocking out the real world, Flor Salvador heard strange chirping sounds.
“I didn’t know we had birds!” she wrote in her journal.
The moral of it all? Unplug, dammit. You might just discover something new and exciting.
Heck, you might even meet some new people and not want to spend 12 hours a day glued to your computer. Crazy, I know, but it just might happen. And don’t worry if your YouTube stats drop or you lose a few Twitter followers, if you’re able to hear the birds birds again, it’s worth it.