| A Companion to Wolves is beautiful. Elves that are also dwarves, the reverse double-looped backhand genderfuckery, the harsh grandeur of the closely pseudo-Nordic tundra and giant psychic wolves that kill trolls for a living.
I did wonder why, if the wolfcarls are affected by their trellwolves going into heat, why do they not also feel childbirth and pregnancy? Perhaps, I should read it again and make sure I didn't somehow miss that. | comments: 2 someones stayed on the pot or Piss or get off the pot!   |
| May 11 2008 1:26AM - Finished Little Brother. The prose is nothing special; it tells the story, no more, no less (hilarious dialogue though in many places and deadly serious in others). But the ideas, man, the ideas! Those Mundane-SF folks don't know what they're talking about, *this* is the first *true* Mundane SF book according to the precepts of their faith. It's part novel, part fictionalized textbook - like Crecy for improvisional hi-tech survivalism and security defeat.
Steal this book. Shoplift this book. Read this book. READ THIS BOOK. | | comments: 6 someones stayed on the pot or Piss or get off the pot! |
| That Spook Country/End of the World Blues genre - Present Terse? Hypernow? Realismic? Radical Speculative Presentism? ProtoMundane? Contemporary Cyberpunk? Here-and-Now Cyberpunk? - yeah, that genre. The following would come in handy if someone were interested in writing that sort of thing.
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Mirror's Edge: Makes me want to engage in tmesis. Not so much revo-fucking-lutionary as about-goddamn-time. See?
Masdar: No cars, haha, NO CARS! YES! It's totally bullshit, of course, being funded by Abu Dhabi and all, but still!
Failaka Island: Hasn't been inhabited since rougly 1992. Used mostly for military exercises and the occasional fishing trip. Fascinating ...
Dubai: This place is a cyberpunk setting all by itself, every trope intact and a few new ones to boot.
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hercules team, onion routers, kalaripayattu, le parkour, capoeira, moko, kavandi, geo-caching, urbex, cloverleaf, tiger team, millenium seed bank project
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Yeah, it's like that. | | comments: 2 someones stayed on the pot or Piss or get off the pot! |
| NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit
While detectives were offering reasons why they couldn't start an investigation, she spent nearly four days chained up in a basement only a few blocks from her home. She was repeatedly raped and tortured by two young psychopaths who eventually beat her to death on the day that the police grudgingly started searching for her. Her family's amateur investigation found her before the police did.
Besides her grief, Elle Carmichael was disgusted. The story of Svetlana Aronov was fresh in her mind. Less than two months before Romona Moore vanished in Canarsie, Svetlana Aronov, the white wife of a doctor, went missing on the Upper East Side.
The day after Aronov vanished, police launched a massive search for her and the cocker spaniel, Bim, she had taken for a walk. The NYPD called a press conference, assigned two dozen detectives to the case full-time, and went door to door, passing out flyers with pictures of Aronov and Bim on them. The cops traced the Aronovs' phone and bank records and analyzed surveillance tape gathered from stores and apartment buildings near her home. A police van emblazoned with the department's 800 tip-line number drove around her neighborhood, blaring details of her disappearance over a loudspeaker. A letter was sent to rare-books dealers, a business the Aronovs dabbled in. Detectives reportedly even consulted a psychic.
A bloodhound was assigned to track Bim's scent.
Eventually, Aronov's body surfaced in the East River. It was never determined whether she fell, jumped, or was pushed into the water.
When she's white, investigate. When she's black, procrastinate until exanimate. Thought you knew. | | comments: 1 someone or Piss or get off the pot! |
| Black Man won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Since this has recuscitated some online interest in putting this fine book to the question, I will link to my Unreview which I think was pretty goddamn insightful if I do say so myself.
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Reread The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks for the first time since 1992. I like to think I was a precocious kid but clearly, I am/was full of shit. At least, it has finally ceased to amaze me how much I missed.
Oh and Google Should Know This: Shohobohaum Za is an extraCultural Special Circumstances mercenary in the vein of Cheradenine Zakalwe. The comparisons between The Player of Games and Use of Weapons as well as the case to made for each Culture book being the mirror and anti-matter opposite of another will have to wait for another post.
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| | Tags: | meatspace, movies | | Current Music: | Reading - "Smiley's People" by John le Carré | | Current Location: | Home@Nite | | Subject: | Huh. | | Time: | 10:56 pm | | Current Mood: | interested |
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| I was surprised and amused to discover how huge Nigerian movies have become in the past few years, specifically with the Haitian and, to a lesser extent, African-American population.
What's that biblical saying about prophets being unwanted in their homeland? Has anyone ever said anything about the reverse? | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| Richard K. Morgan on the never-ending SF/Fantasy/New Weird/Mundane SF genre slapfight.
Is it because we are a rich, vibrant and irrepressible mega-genre, with offshoots exploding forth high and free?
New Wave writers lambast and laugh at their predecessors from the so-called Golden Age. Individual authors ally or square up to each other with ludicrous intensity. Lots of furious lit. crit. goes flying this way and that. Splat! Pow! Blood on the dancefloor. Oh, but the times, they are a-changing -- here comes the hard-SF revival to "take back" the genre, to barricade themselves in the genre cabin with their technophilic faith and new frontier spirit and hold off the weirdos for a while. Then cyberpunk kicks down the door all over again, proclaims itself dangerous and subversive (but over here, in this corner, some New Wave purists scoff).
Or is it because we are a bunch of insecure children who do not know how to do business?
"Consolatory" fantasy does well. So does "consolatory" Space Opera. People like it, and so, not unreasonably, they buy it by the ton. Of course, it's become customary in genre debates to sneer and blame this sort of thing on marketing -- as if without the marketing departments, Terry Brooks fans would suddenly be marching en masse into Barnes and Noble and demanding a reprint of In Viriconium; as if marketing is what prevents the readers of Star Wars tie-in novels from developing a passion for Stanislaw Lem. I mean, come on, guys, get real -- enough of the false consciousness rap, already. People know what they like (and, yes, sadly, they tend to like what they know).
Signs point to yes. | | comments: 4 someones stayed on the pot or Piss or get off the pot! |
| Script Review of an Early Version of the Aeon Flux Movie.
EXT - NIGHT - FUTURISTIC WATER PUMPING STATION
AEON FLUX climbs out of a huge futuristic sewer drain and does a bunch of flips and bounces off of pipes to get to the top of a big golden water pump shaped like a bug. She crouches down and licks her lips for several seconds. AEON FLUX opens a zipper on a futuristic purse and LITTLE METAL BALLS fall out. The LITTLE METAL BALLS grow wings and start flying around and we see that they have CAMERA LENSES built into them. AEON FLUX then reaches into her eye socket and pulls out her eyeball. She moans with pleasure as she is doing this. She places her eyeball in a bottle full of bubbling green liquid and then puts a metal ball in her eye socket.
...
TREVOR GOODCHILD
Wake up my cupcake, I am here to feed the children.
TREVOR embraces the woman and starts licking her neck. With his free hand he uses a robotic speculum to open a wound on the woman's chest. The woman starts moaning and TREVOR licks all the way down her body to the wound and then he presses his eye up to the wound. Inside are millions of giant cell-like creatures and they are VIBRATING STRANGELY and making a chattering sound.TREVOR GOODCHILD
Hello, little lovelies. Father has brought treats.
TREVOR bites into a false tooth and pink goo streams down his tongue and into the wound. The vibrating cell creatures start feasting on the goo and chattering happily. The woman moans some more.
Look at that what-might-have-been shit. LOOK AT IT MOTHERFUCKER YOU KNOW THIS IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU GOT WHY DID YOU LET THIS HAPPEN YOU EASY MOTHERFUCKERS | | comments: 6 someones stayed on the pot or Piss or get off the pot! |
| A technologically enhanced High Noon on Youtube, wherein the cyborg sheriff does battle with android badmen from beyond the stars.
And then there's:
This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.
Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.
William Gibson on Meryl Streep as a chihuahua-headed kung-fu action heroine. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| | Tags: | linkage, me, writing | | Current Music: | Boondocks Clip - Huey vs. The Blind N****a Samurai | | Current Location: | HomeAlone@PastMidNite | | Subject: | "Hundred and Four: Word Science in Practice." | | Time: | 01:01 am | | Current Mood: | determined |
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| | If one is going to be serious about becoming a Real Writer, it is necessary to actually do the work. As such, I am now and have been for months now, a founding member of Hundred and Four, conceived, administered and edited by Hannibal Tabu. This shit is serious and I intend to treat it as such; my first assignment and those of my colleagues are up as we speak. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| One is "... huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant.", the other is a "... monstrously intelligent giant baby." The conclusion is obvious:
Hubertus Bigend is Judge Holden! | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| | Tags: | flist, lj | | Current Music: | None. | | Current Location: | Work@Day | | Time: | 01:40 pm | | Current Mood: | salutory |
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| Happy Birthday, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) katarik! May the blessings of the One-Eyed Saviour and his Adversary-Consort fall upon you. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| "There is something glorious about a pair of champions of different persuasions facing each other at the heights of their powers, battling toward that final moment of defeat or triumph." - "Psychoshop" by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny
I love this book more than I love your mom -- and she is, like, totally hot, dude.
PS
Kaleideion = a class of humanoid Kwisatz Haderach produced as the evolutionary pinnacle of various uplifted Terran animal species.
Colosodian = the primus inter pares of the itself genetically and psychically enhanced homo sapiens phenome. They become intergalactic/temporal bounty hunters who greet each other with a sequence of attempted death touches.
PPS
I know, I know, the characterization is frictionless spherical cardboard. I hereby deem it acceptable for our purposes. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
| Matt Fraction does something hugely unexpected and, from a certain point of view that I hold dear, maddening in this issue. At the same time, it's such a drastic reversal of the norm that I can't help but admire the sheer audacious humanity of it.
On the other hand, it still comes down to a female character being killed as part of a male character's character arc. | | comments: Piss or get off the pot! |
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amused