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Monday, March 31, 2014

Musical Monday - The Guy Who Yelled Freebird by The Doubleclicks


This Friday my redhead and I are going to go see the Doubleclicks perform in New York. And then we are going to go see them again (and Molly Lewis) in Virginia on the following Monday. I know you are all jealous of us. And I don't blame you. After all, not everyone gets to see Angela and Aubrey perform twice in four days. But if you do get to see them perform one day, one thing you should make sure not to do is yell "Freebird". If you do, then they are likely to make fun of you in song form.

And rightly so. Yelling "Freebird" at concerts is a joke that is extraordinarily tired now. It is as tired as telling a cashier that the product that isn't ringing up properly must be free. Yelling it out at concerts is neither clever nor funny, and the only people who do it any more are basically obnoxious and unoriginal real-life trolls. So save yourself the embarrassment of joining such company and simply don't yell Freebird.

Previous Musical Monday: Let It Go by Idina Menzel
Subsequent Musical Monday: The Year of the Beard by Molly Lewis

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Book Blogger Hop March 28th - April 3rd: In 1964 Donald Bernstein Demonstrated That All Numbers Are Equal to 47

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Jack of The Book Stop asks (via Billy): What are some of your favorite book blogs?


This is where I reveal that in some ways, I'm a very bad book blogger because I rarely read other book blogs. In fact, I rarely read reviews of fiction in any form. I tend to skip over sections in publications like Fantasy & Science Fiction and Locus that feature book reviews. It's not that I don't like reviews, it is just that I have a hard time following them unless I have actually read the book being reviewed. This is, of course, very ironic in that I write reviews in the hope that other people will read them.

Instead, I'm going to pick my current obsession, the Galactic Suburbia podcast hosted by Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, and Tansy Rayner Roberts. Galactic Suburbia is an Australian podcast (with the hosts recording from Melbourne, Perth, and Hobarth) focused on science fiction and fantasy with a decidedly feminist bent. They put out a new episode about once a month, with each one lasting between one and half and two hours. Alex is a reviewer, Tansy is a science fiction author, and Alisa is a science fiction publisher, and the three of them talk about issues in the science fiction community, the nominations for and winners of a variety of science fiction awards (with a slant towards science fiction awards in Australia such as the Ditmar and Aurealis awards) , and "culture consumed" where they talk about the genre fiction culture that they had consumed in since the previous episode. Their conversations are brilliant, funny, informative, and insightful. I simply cannot recommend them enough.

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: '48 Is an Alternate History Novel by James Herbert

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Friday, March 28, 2014

Follow Friday - There Were 151 Pokémon in the Original Set


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Mo Books and NjKinney's World of Books.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Snap it Time! A picture is worth a thousand words. Anything and anything. Just give us a pic.

How about some pictures of the Doubleclicks, because next Friday my wife and I be seeing them perform live. And then we'll be seeing them live again the Monday after that. As a bonus, have some pictures of our nerdy friends who we are going to go see get married in late April.


And here is a picture of Molly Lewis performing with Jon Coulton and Storm of Paul & Storm. I'm going to go see her perform live in April as well when she appears with the Doubleclicks on the Monday after next. I don't think Coulton or Paul & Storm will be there, but since Storm lives in Northern Virginia, there is some possibility that he may crash the event.


And just to bring this back to book-related things, here are some pictures of me with a couple of authors. Left to right, me with Terry Brooks, me with Robert J. Sawyer, and me with Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon.


Go to previous Follow Friday: A Professor's Cube Has 150 Squares

Follow Friday     Home

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Review - Realms of Fantasy (August 2011) by Douglas Cohen (editor) and Shawna McCarthy (fiction editor)


Stories included:
The Progress of Solstice and Chance by Richard Bowes
Isabella's Garden by Naomi Kritzer
Collateral Damage by Kate Riedel
Snake in the Grass by W.R. Thompson
Leap of Faith by Alan Smale

Full review: After the emotional high of the June 2011 issue, there was a certain inevitability to the let down represented by the August 2011 issue of Realms of Fantasy. The June issue was the publication's one hundredth, and there were high hopes that the financial troubles of the magazine were behind it. But with this issue, the ugly reality began to show through. The fiction became an uneven collection ranging from average to quite good. Instead of focusing on a featured artist, the issue provided a broad but fairly superficial article about women in fantasy art. After the in depth Folkroots article about fairies from the June issue, the follow up Folkroots article on monsters seems shallow. Perhaps the most foreboding sign is the notation in the upper right hand corner of the cover advertising the "new lower price" for the magazine. In general, a publication that is counting on a reduced sales price to stay afloat is a publication that is in trouble.

The strongest story in the issue is Isabella's Garden by Naomi Kritzer, a mother's tale about her precocious daughter's increasingly disturbing talent for gardening. One wouldn't think a preschool aged child loving to plant things in the backyard could be creepy and somewhat terrifying, but Kritzer manages to make it so. The story starts off feeling mundane - a mother and her child planting turnips and cabbages in the backyard, and then becomes more and more unsettling as time goes by. First Isabella plants jelly bean in the backyard, which wouldn't be cause for concern except that it grows into a jelly bean plant. Then she plants a quarter. And then she decides that she wants a little sister and concocts a plan to overcome her mother's infertility. By the end of the story, what had seemed so innocent and sweet is transformed into something that is innocent and threatening.

The other two strong stories in the volume are both Biblically-inspired fantasies, each approaching the idea of the end of the world from a different direction. Alan Smale's Leap of Faith takes on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, twisting the tale to make Levi the central character as God's engineer. As the tale opens, Levi is returning to his home after working away to keep creation stitched together, and after picking up a pair of wayward angels, makes his way to his unhappy wife Rebekah, his teenage daughter Deborah, and his younger daughter Leah. All three women are upset by Levi's long absences, and each makes her displeasure known in a different manner. The story focuses in on Levi's relationship with Deborah, who turns out to be something of an engineer herself. Alongside this family conflict, Levi has to deal with his two angelic guests and the anger of his neighbors. If this story sounds a bit jumbled up compared to the story from Genesis, it is, and the a certain extent, that is the point. But the greater theme of the story is the power of creativity, and the fact that creativity cannot be subservient, but must be allowed to run free in order to be able to be expressed. The other Bible-based story in the issue is Snake in the Grass by W.R. Thompson, a darkly humorous and satirical piece about the Satan, the Antichrist, and the impending end of the world. As the story opens Fred Larabie is an accountant who has just buried his father. Larabie's only real intent is to get drunk and stew over the fact that he could never seem to measure up to his father's expectations, but is interrupted by Satan who offers him a lifetime of happiness in exchange for his soul. Larabie accepts and soon finds Satan arranging his life, moving Larabie into a house in an undesirable neighborhood, requisitioning an apple tree for the backyard, eliminating the nearby biker gang and meth lab, arranging for Larabie to fall into a relationship with his landscaper, a muscular but innocent woman named Cheryl. Before too long, Satan has Larabie involved in a scheme to acquire some real estate and start a business and it becomes clear that Satan actually doesn't have Larabie's happiness as his goal. Satan, it turns out, has some issues of his own with his father, and it falls to Larabie and Cheryl to save both their future child and the world itself from Satan's fit of pique. I thought this story was slightly better than Leap of Faith, but only because I tend to prefer satirical fiction, and Snake in the Grass is loaded with heaping spoonfuls of satire.

Somewhat less effective is Collateral Damage by Kate Riedel, which seems to me to have been an interesting idea let down by somewhat flawed execution. Martha is the wife of a retired farmer whose long-lost sister Peggy walks out of a blizzard fifty years after she disappeared into one. This doesn't really surprised Martha, as her husband Robert was originally from the Civil War era and stumbled into the same time warping phenomenon before walking out onto her parents' farm when she was a young woman. The story focuses on Martha and Robert's efforts to figure out how to integrate Peggy into the modern world without raising suspicions about the teenage girl who suddenly showed up in their home. As the story goes on, long kept secrets are revealed and long held grudges come to the fore, until in the end Martha makes a decision that will change the remainder of her life. The only trouble is that the story is written in a way that feels almost disjointed at times. I suspect that this is an intentional choice on the part of the author, and is supposed to make the reader feel some of the dislocation experienced by the characters in the story, but instead it makes the reader feel like they are missing some critical part of the narrative when the story skips forward abruptly.

The weakest story in the issue is The Progress of Solstice and Chance by Richard Bowes, a story that attempts to be big and sweeping, and ends up being much too big and sweeping, resulting in characters that are simply too big to be relatable for the reader. In the opening paragraph the King of Winter marries the Queen of Summer, a union arranged by Cronus to keep the King of Winter from dallying with the Lady of Death, wife of the Lord of Life. Shortly thereafter, King Winter and Queen Summer have a child that they name Solstice who grows up shuttling back and forth between the abodes of her parents until the King of Winter's infatuation with the Lady of Death ruins the marriage. Eventually Solstice falls in love with Chance, the years pass, humans forget about these iconic beings, and Solstice pines for the old days when people would line up to see her travel from her father's house to her mother's home every year. The trouble with the story is that the characters are so abstract that I simply didn't care what happened to any of them. We are told that the King of Winter was in love with Lady Death, but we never see why this might be so. We never learn why the Queen of Summer agreed to marry a man who was widely known to be in love with someone else, which makes her rage when she discovers his affair with Lady Death somewhat less than convincing. The story attempts to convey a mythic feel, but paints the characters as representations of natural forces so broadly that they lose their humanity and the story simply falls flat.

By the August 2011 issue, Realms of Fantasy was a magazine desperately fighting for its life. And yet, the issue doesn't feel like a magazine fighting for its life, but rather a magazine that seemed to have been taking an almost lackadaisical approach. The fiction presented was decidedly uneven, and included two Old Testament based stories. Granted, the two Old Testament based stories are among the better pieces of fiction in the volume, but including two so thematically similar stories seems almost lazy. This, coupled with the somewhat underwhelming array of articles and reviews, makes this issue decent, but not particularly notable.

Previous issue reviewed: June 2011
Subsequent issue reviewed: October 2011

Realms of Fantasy     Douglas Cohen     Shawna McCarthy     Magazine Reviews

Home

Monday, March 24, 2014

Musical Monday - Let It Go by Idina Menzel


I'm pretty sure that at this point there are probably only about six people in the world who haven't heard this song. After all, it was featured in the most recent Disney blockbuster animated movie Frozen and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song, resulting in Idina Menzel performing it live on national television. Plus, the song won the Academy Award. The song also reached number nine on the Billboard top 100. And so, as I said before, I suspect that pretty much everyone with access to the internet (and thus, the ability to access this blog) has probably heard this song already.

Even so, I had to make this my Musical Monday selection, because it is an absolutely perfect song from an absolutely perfect fantasy movie. And Idina Menzel (who is not Adele Dazeem, no matter what John Travolta says) has the perfect voice to sing it. From a storytelling perspective, the song is brilliant, showing Elsa's transformation from a scared girl into a woman who can stand on her own - although the be honest, this transformation isn't complete until the close of the movie. But this is the critical point where Elsa begins to turn, shedding her inhibitions and finally accepting her power and her responsibility. This is the point where Elsa begins to become an adult.

Also, any song that includes the lyrics "frozen fractals" is one that tickles my inner math nerd. Plus, building an ice castle out of nothing is incredibly cool, both literally and figuratively. And if one pays attention, one realizes that at the end of the song, Elsa is wearing a dress made out of ice. That is about as hardcore as an ice queen can get.

Previous Musical Monday: Love You Like a Burrito by The Doubleclicks
Subsequent Musical Monday: The Guy Who Yelled Freebird by The Doubleclicks

Idina Menzel     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Book Blogger Hop: March 21st - March 27th: The Atomic Number of Palladium Is 46, Now Go Play Some of Their Role-Playing Games

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Kisha of Books & Shtuff asks (via Billy): What is your favorite weekly meme?

Other than the Follow Friday meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read and the Book Blogger Hop, I haven't participated in any weekly memes. I just don't anticipate new releases of books sufficiently assiduously to be able do things like Waiting on Wednesday, or weekly cover reveals, or any of the other myriad of weekly memes that are out there.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: The 1745 Jacobite Rebellion Is Called "The '45"

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Friday, March 21, 2014

Follow Friday - A Professor's Cube Has 150 Squares


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Fathomless Reveries and My Midnight Fantasies.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: How have your reading habits changed in the past few years? Did you get interested in a new genre? Do you read more? Less? Why do you think your habits changed, if they did.

I seem to read a lot slower than I did a couple of years ago. Actually, I need more recovery time in between books. I used to be able to set one book down when I finished it and pick a new one up seconds later and start plowing through the new book's pages. Now I need some time to digest what I just read, maybe a day or two. I also take more time to write reviews, which results in my reading slowing down as well, because I try to avoid building up a backlog of books that I have read but not yet written reviews for.

A practice that I have adopted in the last year or so is writing reviews of collections of short fiction as I read, writing about each piece of short fiction immediately as I finish it rather than reading through the entire volume and then trying to write everything at the end. This serves (yet again) to slow down my reading, but I believe that this makes my reviews of the individual stories much better, and since so much genre fiction is written in the short forms, this seems to me to be the choice to make.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: There Were 151 Pokémon in the Original Set

Follow Friday     Home

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Review - Realms of Fantasy (June 2011) edited by Douglas Cohen and Shawna McCarthy


Stories included:
The Ground Whereon She Stands by Leah Bobet
Escaping Salvation by Josh Rountree and Samantha Henderson
The Economy of Powerful Emotion by Sharon Mock
The Good Husband by Thea Hutcheson
The Equation by Patrick Samphire
Wreathed in Wisteria, Draped in Ivy by Euan Harvey
The Tides of the Heart by David D. Levine

Poems included:
Distance by Ursula K. Le Guin
Mendenhall Glacier by Ursula K. Le Guin

Full review: Hindsight can be painful. The June 2011 issue of Realms of Fantasy was the one hundredth issue of the troubled publication. The magazine was just coming off being declared dead not once, but two times, and each time being saved at the eleventh hour by an unexpected white knight investor. To commemorate the milestone, this issue was expanded to one hundred pages with an extended letters section full of messages extending congratulations and expressing the hope that the magazine would reach two hundred issues. But looking back, we know the harsh reality that will dash those hopes: Realms of Fantasy would only publish a couple more issues and then finally fold for good. This issue, however, is a strong one, with plenty of good fantasy fiction, an interesting Folkroots article about faeries, and a pair of very moving poems by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The first story in the volume is The Ground Whereon She Stands by Leah Bobet, an enchanted love story gone slightly awry. Set near the border of Idaho and Canada, the story sits in that fairy tale land on the corner of our reality where it could just possibly actually exist. Alice, a somewhat reclusive and not very socially skilled hedgewoman, apparently has a crush on her neighbor Lizzie, and casts a spell to deliver her flowers. But like Alice, the spell doesn't communicate her intentions very well, and Lizzie ends up with far more flowers than Alice intended. The story is told from Lizzie's perspective as she tries to deal with the flowers that cover her kitchen floor, grow through her shower drain, and sprout from her boots all the while attempting to get Alice to remove the enchantment. The stress of dealing with her feelings eventually overwhelms Alice and the story comes to a climax in a scene involving far too many roses and a little bit of blood. The story is a strange, off-kilter romance that is ultimately endearing. A second love story in the volume is The Economy of Powerful Emotion by Sharon Mock, a fairy tale involving a princess who is "blessed" with the ability to cry diamonds. She is loved by her father, but it is a possessive kind of love that exists only to exploit her for her unusual gift and the wealth that it brings. Three princes from a neighboring and impoverished country seek out her hand, but only the third makes it to her, where the story takes a fairly conventional turn as the prince woos her, but he does so in an unusual way. Though the story does involve the prince saving the princess, she also saves him. The entire story is told in little snippets - thirty-eight chapters in four pages, giving the story a staccato feel that serves it well.

A third romance of sorts, The Good Husband by Thea Hutcheson, takes place in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War in some corner of rural America where an older woman named Keeler struggles to keep her farm going. A handsome and kindly stranger damaged by war and calling himself Jody shows up at her door and offers to help work the farm in exchange for room and board. In relatively short order the two become lovers, and then husband and wife, but in the process Keeler becomes younger and healthier and her farm becomes more bountiful. It is soon apparent even to Jody that something is odd, and Keeler reveals that she is a nature spirit of some sort, tied to the land, and both her and the land can only thrive with a husband to tend them. The deal takes its toll, but eventually Jody becomes reconciled to the trade-off that will age him, but heal the psychic scars of war in the process. Coming in the same issue as Theodora Goss' Folkroots about fairies, this seems particularly apropos. Of all of the romances in the issue, this one seems the most real despite the prominent fantastical element. Another off-kilter romance in the issue is The Equation by Patrick Samphire, a story that starts off as the end of a conflict, and ends as the beginning of a love affair. Cameron is a young man returning to his high school neighborhood who runs into an old crush named Rachel in a coffee shop. They sit and have the sort of conversation that old schoolmates have, until Rachel starts warning Cameron that if he continues along the path he's chosen she and the rest of his former classmates, acting under the direction of their old teacher Miss Haversham, will stop him. It seems that Cameron has been traveling the world trying to collect, and presumably preserve, the remaining bits of magic in the world, while Miss Haversham and his former classmates have been trying to eliminate it by reducing magic to nothing more than equations. The central conceit of the story is that magic is what makes cultures around the world unique, and eliminating magic will have the beneficial effect of eliminating strife and conflict, but at the cost of eliminating the diversity and beauty of human culture. The story wraps up a bit too quickly and a bit too easily, but it is interesting.

The biggest, and most unusual romance in the book is The Tides of the Heart by David D. Levine. Louise Hartmann is a plumber with a string of failed relationships and a secret: She is part of a mysterious guild of artisans who work hard to keep the denizens of the "other world" from wracking too much havoc on the ordinary mortals of our world. The story opens as Lou takes care of an emergency client unknowingly has a problem with an annoyed nixie, but soon shifts to a demolition site where she has been contracted to remove antique plumbing from some houses before they are torn down to make way for the gentrification of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, one of the houses is occupied by an unhappy undine that has been trapped inside for more than a century and a half. As the project is on a schedule, and simply destroying the house with the undine inside will apparently wreck the local economy, Lou tries increasingly desperate measures to release the water creature from its mystical imprisonment. Eventually, Lou makes a grand sweeping and somewhat foolhardy measure, testing whether the distinction between marriage and same-sex domestic partnerships has meaning for creatures from the other world. And it seems the distinction may matter, but not in the way that the characters expected. In the end, the story is an enjoyable combination of dangerous magic and daring risks taken in pursuit of madcap romance.

After all of the fantasies centered on romantic relationships in the issue, one would think a story with a title like Wreathed in Wisteria, Draped in Ivy would be more of the same. But instead, the Euan Harvey tale is a story about power, revenge, and death. Set in a fantasy version of China, the story is actually a story within an story within a story, each nested one within the other. The initial part of the story is attributed to Zheng Chao, a court official sending a report to the Lord Cheng Heng concerning the Baron Nie of Minyue and his actions during a recent attempt to overthrow King Luo Yushan. Zheng relates the Baron's story, telling it as the Baron's Tale, who presents his conundrum concerning the request from the Duke of Shu to rise up against their unpopular sovereign despite the fact that he believes that this would upset the natural order due to the Emperor appearing to hold the mandate of Heaven. While he is contemplating his options, the Baron finds an old man at the foot of a hill covered with an enormous cemetery. The tale then shifts to the story the old man recounts for the Baron in which he encountered a mysterious stranger who had predicted his death, leading to a climatic confrontation with death itself. Having telescoped in through three layers of storytellers, the story now backs out, one layer at a time, explaining how the old man's encounter with death itself shaped the old man's life, Baron Nie's life, Zheng Chao's life, and prospectively Cheng Heng's life. One would think that a story that tells a story within a story within a story wouldn't work very well, but in the case of Wreathed in Wisteria, Draped in Ivy, it appears that there really could be no other way to tell this story, and it turns out brilliantly.

A fantasy story tinged with a bit of horror, Escaping Salvation by Josh Rountree and Samantha Henderson takes place in a post-apocalyptic American southwest that has been transformed into an even harsher desert than it is now. And because this is a fantasy story, the dust storms that swirl through this wasteland give rise to dirt angels, animated out of the very sand and dirt of the maelstrom. Lizzy and Roe, two angel hunters, run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and desperately seek shelter in a tent city called Salvation led by a slightly creepy young woman named Ganj. To pay for their accommodations, Lizzy agrees to hunt a dirt angel and recover its eyes and tongue for Ganj's younger sister Bea. The story gets progressively creepier as the layers of ignorance and deception are peeled away until Bea is restored and everything is revealed. The story does a great job of giving just enough background information to establish the setting, but the horror seems to accelerate a little too quickly to allow for a substantial build up of tension. Overall, the story is interesting enough and well-written enough to be worthwhile reading.

In a way, the issue is symbolized by the second of the Le Guin poems, Mendenhall Glacier, which regards a glacier as a metaphorical dragon dying a slow, cold death. And in a way, Realms of Fantasy was like that glacier: A beautiful artifact, frozen in time, quietly limping its way to oblivion. But along the way, they published beautiful stories of fantasy fiction, leaving behind a legacy of issues like this one that we can still benefit from.

Previous issue reviewed: April 2011
Subsequent issue reviewed: August 2011

Realms of Fantasy     Douglas Cohen     Shawna McCarthy     Magazine Reviews

Home

Monday, March 17, 2014

Musical Monday - Love You Like a Burrito by The Doubleclicks


So, I got married last Friday. And because the Doubleclicks seem to have a telepathic link into my life, they wrote a song that explains exactly how much I love the woman I married. She is in the video, holding a sign that says "not" at the 0:40 mark. I love her like a flour tortilla stuffed with beans, rice, cheese, peppers, and usually some sort of grilled meat. Probably shrimp. Sometimes chicken. And sour cream. Mmmmm, sour cream.

Well, no actually they didn't. I mean even though I am a huge fan of theirs, the Doubleclicks didn't write the song because I got married. Or because I love my wife like a burrito. It was probably just a happy coincidence that they wrote the perfect song at the perfect time. Probably. All the rest is true: The part about me getting married. The part about loving her like a burrito. The part about the shrimp and chicken. Especially the part about the shrimp and chicken.

Previous Musical Monday: If I Didn't Have You by Tim Minchin
Subsequent Musical Monday: Let It Go by Idina Menzel

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Friday, March 14, 2014

Follow Friday - The Supreme Court Decided Tomatoes Were Vegetables in Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Sylvia's Literary BlogSpot and Sarcasm & Lemons.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Spring is in the air! Show off your favorite outdoors reading spot. If you don’t go outside . . . well where else do you read that isn’t inside your house? We want pics!

I don't usually read outside. Partially because I don't really like reading outside - the wind always seems to be trying to flip the pages, the sun's glare always seems to be on the part of the page that I'm trying to read, and so on - and partially because there's really no place that I can read outside because I live in an apartment and don't have an outside are to call my own.

But that doesn't really concern me today. Because today, I got married.


Go to previous Follow Friday: Dunbar's Number Is 148
Go to subsequent Follow Friday: A Professor's Cube Has 150 Squares

Follow Friday     Home

Monday, March 10, 2014

Musical Monday - If I Didn't Have You by Tim Minchin


Today's Musical Monday selection is apropos of a text conversation that I was a secondary party to yesterday. By that I mean I wasn't directly involved in the texting, but the individual on my end let the other party know that she was sharing the texted information to me in order to formulate her responses. The exact content of the conversation is not really all that important. What is important is that I think Tim Minchin has humorously hit on a very important truth that so many people would be better off realizing: You do not have a single soul mate. There is not one person out there who was made just for you. Instead, you probably have a range of people who would be suitable partners. As Minchin says, people fall on a bell curve.

To a certain extent, romance novels and movies have a lot to answer for in this regard, as many of them lean heavily on the idea that there is one perfect soul mate for every person, and you just have to find that person and hold on to them in order to be happy. But the reality is that there are probably a substantial number of people whom you could spend your life with and be perfectly happy. Each choice would lead to a different path - some partners might be smarter than others, but less talented in other areas. Some partners might share a certain set of interests with you but not others, while the alternative choice would share a different array of interests with you. And so on. All that you really need to make a relationship work is a degree of shared interest, and to be perfectly honest I've seen some functional relationships that didn't even have that.

So when that guy or girl walks out the door, you haven't lost your chance at love and happiness. There are many other people out there that would probably make you just as happy, only in a different way. That isn't to say it's not going to hurt - part of what makes a relationship work and fondness grow is familiarity and a shared history. But in the end, someone else will probably do just as nicely, and you can take solace in that.

Previous Musical Monday: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton
Subsequent Musical Monday: Love You Like a Burrito by The Doubleclicks

Tim Minchin     Musical Monday     Home

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Book Blogger Hop: March 7th - March 13th: The 1745 Jacobite Rebellion Is Called "The '45"

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Elizabeth of Silver's Reviews asks (via Billy): Do you have a schedule set for blogging and reading time? Or do you not have a set time and just let it happen?

The answer to this question depends on how specific one is when referring to a "schedule". I have a broad, loose, and fairly flexible reading and blogging schedule that I have mapped out, but it is so vague in places that calling it a schedule is essentially an insult to the concept of "schedules". I tend to put reading material into categories, and then prioritize which categories to read through, although the only real organizational metric is "my whim". For example, right now, I am working my way through the backlog of magazines that I let build up over the last two years. After that, I'll start pulling books off of  my ARC shelf and clearing out that backlog. And so on. But I'm reading the magazines in no particular order other than "the one that is on top of the stack", and I'll be reading the ARCs in no particular order other than "which book I pulled off the shelf this time." And as I am easily distracted, there is always the very real possibility that I will simply toss this plan aside and read a couple of random books that I pull out of my unread stack because they looked interesting.

As far as posting goes, I have a rough schedule, but once again, the specifics are fairly random. I do a Musical Monday post almost every Monday, but the choice of what music to write about is entirely unplanned, and usually determined on that Monday. I usually post a Follow Friday post every Friday, and a Book Blogger Hop post on Saturday or Sunday, but for obvious reasons the specific topics of the post are not really planned ahead of time. I would like to have a schedule of posting three book reviews a week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but a lack of time caused by the vagaries of life often means that I only post one or two reviews a week. I'd like to get on a schedule of posting a Farscape or Star Trek episode review every Sunday, but I haven't been able to get myself that organized yet.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: Julius Ceasar Was Assassinated in 44 B.C.

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Friday, March 7, 2014

Follow Friday - Dunbar's Number Is 148


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Pottermorebooks and Chapter Break.net.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Recommend some of your favorite back-list books – books that are at least a few years old (I’m thinking 5-10 years old rather than classics).

For me, this request is more of less simply "recommend some books" since most of the books that I recommend are at least five or ten years old. In fact, five or ten years ago is probably a lot more recent than most of the books I generally recommend. I thought about recommending some books by Ursula K. Le Guin, because her books are always good to recommend to people, but most of her best books - The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Lathe of Heaven, and so on - were published in the 1970s, which is probably longer ago than the question is really aiming for.

So instead of recommending books from the 1970s, I'm going to go for some much more recent books from the 1980s. I am going to recommend the five book Book of the New Sun series from Gene Wolfe which consists of Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Conciliator, Sword of the Lictor, Citadel of the Autarch, and Urth of the New Sun. The story follows Severian, an exiled journeyman torturer in a future so distant that history is no longer recorded, who lives on a world where the sun is dying and has faded so much that one can see stars at midday. The world has advanced and regressed, with medieval implements apparently coexisting side by side in common use with exotic highly advanced technology, the means of using which has often been completely forgotten. Severian fights his relatives, travels through time, recovers an ancient artifact, possibly becomes his own ancestor, and becomes more than one person., all on the way to restoring Earth's sun. The books are exotic, weird, science fiction at its best.

Go to previous Follow Friday: 147 Is the Highest Possible Break in Snooker

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Thursday, March 6, 2014

Review - Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes


Short review: Colonists on an alien world disturb the local ecosystem with unpleasant consequences, and the lone military guy with the expedition has to save their bacon. Again.

Haiku
Its just Beowulf
Aliens instead of trolls
Soldiers for heroes

Full review: The Legacy of Heorot is at its core a science fiction version of Beowulf. The first extra-solar human colony lands on a relatively small island that the inhabitants call Avalon. They find no large fauna, certainly no large dangerous fauna, and the colonists begin to become lax in their security procedures. Cadmann, the lone military/security specialist in the expedition, warns against letting their guard down, but the other colonists mostly ignore him.

Of course, it turns out that Cadmann is right, and the foolish pacifist colonists are wrong. A native predator shows up with the ability to move at terrifying speed and kills a couple of the colonists. The creature is quickly dubbed a "grendel" (to make the parallel more explicit). Under Cadmann's direction, the colonists kill the intruder and eventually root out the remaining grendels on the island, although the foolish colonists ignore Cadmann's advice a couple times, leading to further loss of life.

Killing off the grendels turns out to have been a huge mistake, and due to a life-cycle quirk (that the colonists, being supposedly crack scientists, should have figured out sooner), the colony is beset with thousands of grendels. Cadmann defends the colony, and all is well. The outcome is never truly in doubt, as Cadmann says, the grendels are basically nothing more than animals. Really fast and strong animals certainly, but nothing more than that.

The book seems somewhat disjointed at times, which one might expect from a work resulting from the collaboration between three authors. Some characters seem to forget pieces of information they learned earlier in the book, and some reasonably obvious connections between data are not made for prolonged periods of time. The book makes some attempt to explain this with "hibernation instability", but this seems like an incomplete answer at most, as the information and connections in question should have pretty quickly been linked up by someone of even merely average intelligence.

One side note, at one point the characters state that the follow-up expedition has been "Proxmired" (in other words, cancelled). This is part of a long-running feud that Niven and Pournelle (and many other science fiction authors) have had with former Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire (now deceased), criticizing him for opposing what they considered to be valuable scientific research and funding for the space program in order to (they allege) make sure there was enough money to fund agricultural studies. I tend to agree with Niven and Pournelle on this, but they use the name "Proxmire" in the middle of this book without any explanation, which probably will confuse some readers.

It is a decent book, and an enjoyable take on the Beowulf myth, but not really anything more than that.

1988 Locus Award Nominees

Steven Barnes     Larry Niven     Jerry Pournelle     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Review - The Descent of Anansi by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes


Short review: A lunar orbital colony desperate for money sells its wares to Japan, but Brazil isn't going to take this lying down.

Haiku
Independence day!
Raise funds by selling cable
Fight the Brazilians

Full review: The back cover of the book says:

"It's the American Revolution all over again. But this time it's a rag-tag band of space colonists vs. the United states. And the fate of the world hangs by a thread - 200 miles above the earth."

This blurb is almost completely unconnected with anything that actually happens in the book. This doesn't make it a bad book. Actually, the story that is in the book is probably better than the one the back cover describes. It is definitely a better story than the one contained in Achilles' Choice was.

Falling Angel is a research and manufacturing facility in the Moon's orbit. Early in the book, the handful of inhabitants, tired of being ignored by the U.S. government and having their funding cut, vote to sever ties with the U.S. This leaves them needing money, so they auction off their most valuable product - a super-thin and super-strong monofilament cable - to the highest bidder. The last two firms bidding are a Brazilian firm and a Japanese firm. The Japanese firm massively outbids the Brazilians and Falling Angel sends the shuttle Anansi to deliver the goods.

Instead of taking being outbid lying down, the Brazilians take steps to steal the cable. They arrange with a Muslim terrorist organization to blow up the shuttle with a missile, but the Brazilians double-cross the terrorists to merely damage the shuttle so a pair of their own shuttles can go and get the cable by persuasion or force. The experienced crew of the Anansi has to improvise to defend against the armed and numerically superior, but inexperienced, Brazilian pirates.

The U.S. government doesn't factor into the plot in any way other than the most tangential manner. The only thing that hangs by a thread is whether the Japanese will get the cable they bid on, and whether the crew of the Anansi will survive.

The back cover is a lie. The book, however, is still good.

1983 Locus Award Nominees

Steven Barnes     Larry Niven     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, March 3, 2014

Musical Monday - Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton


So what happens to the corporate world after the zombie apocalypse? According to Jonathan Coulton, not much changes. The subject of the song just changes his focus from trying to use his MBA to make deals involving dollars to trying to make deals to consume your brains. And he's very reasonable about it, trying to split the difference and only negotiate for brain consumption, while leaving you your eyes and presumably your other appendages. All he really wants is the brain, and is that really too much to sacrifice? You weren't going to hoard it all to yourself, were you?

This song, and this video are a good example of why Coulton is the king of nerd folk music. His ability to find the off-kilter humor in strange situations - like a a zombie who happens to be a business school graduate - plus his ability to relate to a crowd are what makes him a star. The way he brings the entire audience into the song, having them take the role of the zombie horde is brilliant. And only Coulton would encourage the audience not only to sing the chorus, but to sing the chorus badly. Because they are zombies, and might be experiencing some wear and tear on their corpsified bodies.

Previous Musical Monday: Ghostbusters by Ray Parker, Jr.
Subsequent Musical Monday: If I Didn't Have You by Tim Minchin

Jonathan Coulton     Musical Monday     Home

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Book Blogger Hop: February 28th - March 6th: Julius Ceasar Was Assassinated in 44 B.C.

Book Blogger Hop

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Elizabeth of Silver's Reviews asks (via Billy): Have you stopped accepting books from either authors or publishers to try to catch up? If not, do you think you would ever do that?

I have such a tremendous backlog of review copies that I have put a de facto halt to accepting new books until I catch up, although I haven't explicitly done so. I still read the requests from authors and publishers asking if I will read and review their books, but a pitch has to really impress me to get me to respond positively right now. The only ARC that I have actually requested in the last six months or so is Dearest by Alethea Kontis, and that is because I really love Alethea's work. I guess the best way to describe my process right now is that I have become much more selective than I was a year ago, to the point where a book has to meet an almost impossibly high bar in order for me to consider saying yes to the review copy.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: Sheldon Cooper's Hacky Sacking High Score Is 43
Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The 1745 Jacobite Rebellion Is Called "The '45"

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