this is not the post you're looking for
So, I'm on hiatus. I didn't mean to be on hiatus, which is why I never really posted a "goodbye, cruel internetz!!" post before disappearing for three days and then emerging, fresh-faced and glowy, from post-work doom. Um. Somehow, post-work never really happened, and so, instead, I have current work doom.
So, kind lovely people who emailed to check I was alive - I am, indeed, alive. Had a really bad couple of weeks (bad enough to consider selling up and running away to join the circus), but my secondment completed without a hitch, and I have a shiny feedback document that sings my praises to my bosses, lest they ever forget how awesome I am, and how many other companies would like to hire me. (Hah! I am so made of win.)
That, alas, was Past Work. I have Current Work, at Current Client, and Current Client is very far away. VERY far away. My working day is 12 - 14 hours long. Bad for enough sleeping time. bad for enough revision time. I am not impressed. But I'll finish tomorrow, and then I am on study leave, hurrah!
I suppose I am technically still on hiatus during it, 'cause otherwise I will explode from stress, but in the meantime:
1) WTF is fanlib and why is my flist flooded with tl;dr essays on it? Someone summarise for the time-challenged, please!
2) I will see a movie, or show, or PEOPLE again soon.
3) I have read all the books in the world. Have a review of
The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester
I've gotta go back a little bit. Several years ago, an enterprising group of fans decided to do a MST3-ing of Season 5 of Babylon 5. The misting was fine, as mistings go - sometimes funny, sometimes not, always irrevenrent - but one thing kept jarring me out of it: they kept referring to telepaths as 'peeps'. This, as any B5 fan will tell you, is WRONG, because telepaths are TPs, therefore they're called 'teeps' - and 'teeks' for telekinetics. See? That little difference always bugged me, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was meant to signify. Eyes? People? Somehow, snooping never came into it.
It wasn't until I read The Demolished Man that I realised that 'peeps' stood for 'peepers', which was a somewhat derotagory name for members of the Esper Guild. Actually, it wasn't until I read The Demolished Man that I realised just how much source material JMS had simply lifted straight out of there. You know what they say - good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright. Well, this certainly puts JMS in the top 10, then! It's hard to blame him for it, though, because The Demolished Man reads more or less like a blueprint for every interpretation of telepathy since.
The book itself is quite difficult to read, which is odd because it is so short (coming in at under 200 pages). It's written in a quite odd style, however - vaguely 40s pulp fiction - with characters shouting and raving all the time, and random women turning up naked for no particular reason. There are real pieces of trash, and real bags of scum, and other colourful euphamisms. I'm not really a fan of noirish detective novels, so I was having some trouble following the actual story, which is about a man committing murder in a society regulated by telepaths - and getting away with it.This necessitated setting up the following ideas. Stop me if they sound familiar:
- The Esper Guild itself, where the Guild - and those who trained you - command your first and oldest loyalty. You are to think of them as mother and father. The Guild raises you, and clothes you, and feeds you, and in return, you pay a stupid percentage of whatever you earn back to them as taxes.
- The structure of the Guild, where those with the highest ratings are in charge, and everyone has to get married to a fellow telepath by the time they reach 40, and young women become hopelessly besotted with their older, more powerful mentors.
- Telepathic evidence not being admissable in court.
- A person, instead of being executed, having their minds wiped of their previous personalities, and having them rebuilt from scratch - and this being accepted, and humane.
- A telepath, having committed a crime, is not given to an outside tribunal - but is instead brought in to the Guild, and the top rated telepaths all gang up to break through his walls and find out the truth.
- A group of dissidents, complaining about excessive Guild control, trying to finangle their way to independence.
- A good way to stop a telepath eavesdropping on your thoughts is to get a little jingle or rhyme going on a loop instead your head. All together, now , "this is the song that does not end, it keeps on going on, my friends -"
- A telepathic police chief, trying to catch a killer, firmly believing in the Guild and everything it stands for, committed to the Secret Pledge, determined to educate the dissidents who are obviously mistaken about the Guild, is horrifyingly powerful and ruthless.
Yup. This book is so chock-a-block full of ideas that they're falling out of every pore. It's a little bewildering. A lot of these ideas have been picked up by later writers and expanded upon, so they're really familiar by now, but it's still fascinating to see their genesis. Powell, for instance, is a proto-Bester - only, Bester as he'd like the world to perceive him, maybe - which really threw me for a loop when it finally occured to me (which, I admit, was near the end). The easy way in which Powell deals with the normals around him, and the faint, but unmistakeable, traces of disdain that he isn't even aware that he's showing - take those, magnify them by ten million, and you're approaching Bester. On CRACK. (True.)
I'd recommend this book if you have an interest in telepath fiction - or scifi with a telepath content, I suppose - and want to see a pioneer at work. I'd say that the style of the writing is somewhat problematic (it is necessarily roughly hewn at times, which makes it sometimes difficult to stay 'into' it), but that it's worth persevering with. .
4) Did I mention the hours?
*goes to bed*
So, kind lovely people who emailed to check I was alive - I am, indeed, alive. Had a really bad couple of weeks (bad enough to consider selling up and running away to join the circus), but my secondment completed without a hitch, and I have a shiny feedback document that sings my praises to my bosses, lest they ever forget how awesome I am, and how many other companies would like to hire me. (Hah! I am so made of win.)
That, alas, was Past Work. I have Current Work, at Current Client, and Current Client is very far away. VERY far away. My working day is 12 - 14 hours long. Bad for enough sleeping time. bad for enough revision time. I am not impressed. But I'll finish tomorrow, and then I am on study leave, hurrah!
I suppose I am technically still on hiatus during it, 'cause otherwise I will explode from stress, but in the meantime:
1) WTF is fanlib and why is my flist flooded with tl;dr essays on it? Someone summarise for the time-challenged, please!
2) I will see a movie, or show, or PEOPLE again soon.
3) I have read all the books in the world. Have a review of
The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester
I've gotta go back a little bit. Several years ago, an enterprising group of fans decided to do a MST3-ing of Season 5 of Babylon 5. The misting was fine, as mistings go - sometimes funny, sometimes not, always irrevenrent - but one thing kept jarring me out of it: they kept referring to telepaths as 'peeps'. This, as any B5 fan will tell you, is WRONG, because telepaths are TPs, therefore they're called 'teeps' - and 'teeks' for telekinetics. See? That little difference always bugged me, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was meant to signify. Eyes? People? Somehow, snooping never came into it.
It wasn't until I read The Demolished Man that I realised that 'peeps' stood for 'peepers', which was a somewhat derotagory name for members of the Esper Guild. Actually, it wasn't until I read The Demolished Man that I realised just how much source material JMS had simply lifted straight out of there. You know what they say - good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright. Well, this certainly puts JMS in the top 10, then! It's hard to blame him for it, though, because The Demolished Man reads more or less like a blueprint for every interpretation of telepathy since.
The book itself is quite difficult to read, which is odd because it is so short (coming in at under 200 pages). It's written in a quite odd style, however - vaguely 40s pulp fiction - with characters shouting and raving all the time, and random women turning up naked for no particular reason. There are real pieces of trash, and real bags of scum, and other colourful euphamisms. I'm not really a fan of noirish detective novels, so I was having some trouble following the actual story, which is about a man committing murder in a society regulated by telepaths - and getting away with it.This necessitated setting up the following ideas. Stop me if they sound familiar:
- The Esper Guild itself, where the Guild - and those who trained you - command your first and oldest loyalty. You are to think of them as mother and father. The Guild raises you, and clothes you, and feeds you, and in return, you pay a stupid percentage of whatever you earn back to them as taxes.
- The structure of the Guild, where those with the highest ratings are in charge, and everyone has to get married to a fellow telepath by the time they reach 40, and young women become hopelessly besotted with their older, more powerful mentors.
- Telepathic evidence not being admissable in court.
- A person, instead of being executed, having their minds wiped of their previous personalities, and having them rebuilt from scratch - and this being accepted, and humane.
- A telepath, having committed a crime, is not given to an outside tribunal - but is instead brought in to the Guild, and the top rated telepaths all gang up to break through his walls and find out the truth.
- A group of dissidents, complaining about excessive Guild control, trying to finangle their way to independence.
- A good way to stop a telepath eavesdropping on your thoughts is to get a little jingle or rhyme going on a loop instead your head. All together, now , "this is the song that does not end, it keeps on going on, my friends -"
- A telepathic police chief, trying to catch a killer, firmly believing in the Guild and everything it stands for, committed to the Secret Pledge, determined to educate the dissidents who are obviously mistaken about the Guild, is horrifyingly powerful and ruthless.
Yup. This book is so chock-a-block full of ideas that they're falling out of every pore. It's a little bewildering. A lot of these ideas have been picked up by later writers and expanded upon, so they're really familiar by now, but it's still fascinating to see their genesis. Powell, for instance, is a proto-Bester - only, Bester as he'd like the world to perceive him, maybe - which really threw me for a loop when it finally occured to me (which, I admit, was near the end). The easy way in which Powell deals with the normals around him, and the faint, but unmistakeable, traces of disdain that he isn't even aware that he's showing - take those, magnify them by ten million, and you're approaching Bester. On CRACK. (True.)
I'd recommend this book if you have an interest in telepath fiction - or scifi with a telepath content, I suppose - and want to see a pioneer at work. I'd say that the style of the writing is somewhat problematic (it is necessarily roughly hewn at times, which makes it sometimes difficult to stay 'into' it), but that it's worth persevering with. .
4) Did I mention the hours?
*goes to bed*