Grumps

[planeterry]

• A few weeks ago I booked a fancy dinner at a fancy restaurant (the monthly Long Table dinner at Bar Lourinha) for next week as a birthday prez for a couple of friends (Loud and the Chef), and the restaurant said they'd ring me back to get my credit card details in a week or so.  I didn't hear from them, so I rang back yesterday and they charged my card over the phone.  A few hours later I got a call from them saying "sorry, we've actually had to cancel the dinner".  Grrrr…am rather pissed off.   And am also suspicious that they actually just overbooked it (there's limited seating) and didn't realize till after they tried charging my card.  Am almost inclined to go along on the night and see if it was really cancelled (particularly before I book again for next month).

• Finally got around to reading Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book".  It's obviously difficult to do time travel (TT) stories these days, it's become a bit of a cliché, etc., but as it had both Hugo and Nebula kudos I thought those audiences would be familiar enough with the trope to be UNlikely to reward a story which wasn't a clear cut above the pack.  I guess it was quite well done, with some nice detail on the the difficulties and unknowns in TT, and in the grit of the history, but I think it could've been a lot better.  I'm probably just disappointed because the blurbs and previous mentions had implied "great suffering", and although there was a great deal, it was almost all in secondary characters.  I could really see a particular arc (and many potential pointers toward it) which would've made the story so much more poignant...
  Specifically, I wanted Kivrin to die and the other timetravellers to know she'd died and not be able to do anything about it, which appeared to be an intended theme anyway, and further, to have Mr Dunworthy travel back in time out of guilt, disguised as Father Roche despite knowing he would be constrained by temporal inertia from doing anything to rescue her, or from doing anything which conflicted with what they already knew had happened There were also several loose ends, which were just asking to be neatly tied up in a TT fashion, as well as plotholes.  I'd recommend Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime as a better TT story (which is kinda sad, since Doomsday beat another really good Vinge for the Hugo)...