Dropbox, Asimov's election, and books
I’m promoting Dropbox again for easy, automatically updating cloud storage. If you use this link to sign up, I get extra space too, but I’d recommend it anyway; I use it to back up my entire computer, which has made moving between computers ten times easier than it used to be.
Here’s the wikipedia entry for a somewhat timely Asimov story, Franchise. I was surprised at how many of the Asimov stories from that period I still remembered. Someday gave me chills as a kid. (In other tech/politics news, I am also obsessively reading stories about the failure of Romney's Orca. Successful computer programs are made of people!)
Scheherazade's Façade: Fantastical Tales of Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Transformation, ed. Michael M. Jones: A fair number of mermaids/mermaid-type creatures in this collection, where genderbending often overlaps with mythical creaturedom. The best story, by Sarah Rees Brennan, features a dragon and a reminder that transformations are dangerous and not always welcome, even when they feel necessary.
Jim C. Hines, Libriomancer (Magic ex Libris, Book One): Isaac is a libriomancer, able to call objects out of books. Popularity can also make phenomena in books real, resulting among other things in the rise of a new, sparkly vampire species. When war breaks out between the libriomancers and the vampires, Isaac-benched for misusing his magic-becomes central to figuring out why and how to stop it, even as the consequences of overuse of magic threaten his health and sanity. Also, there’s a nonexclusive romance with a dryad, and a spider that sets things on fire. (The comma there is important.) It was well enough constructed, but didn’t grab me; still, if you like the idea of reaching into a book and pulling out any object therein, from magic-sensing glasses to the One Ring, you might give this urban fantasy a try.
Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth: All of a sudden, most people-starting with kids-can, with readily made equipment and a potato for a battery, cross over into alternate Earths with no people on them. There’s an apparently infinite series to the “west” and to the “east,” reachable one step at a time. Yes, nausea results, and you can’t take iron across worlds, but other than that it’s easy. Society changes fairly rapidly as a result, in ways good and bad (I didn’t find it particularly plausible that certain crimes didn’t rise much, though some countermeasures-digging basements or putting valuable stuff/people high up, so either way crossing over would be difficult/impossible-made sense, though it did raise unanswered questions about what happened to a person who happened to step into an occupied space). A natural stepper, Joshua, is recruited for a secret project by a computer holding the consciousness of a Tibetan mechanic, investigating a mystery far out across the Earths. There were plenty of interesting ideas, but very few of them got worked out, and the story just stopped at the end of the book, so overall I can’t rank it high among Pratchett’s work.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Here’s the wikipedia entry for a somewhat timely Asimov story, Franchise. I was surprised at how many of the Asimov stories from that period I still remembered. Someday gave me chills as a kid. (In other tech/politics news, I am also obsessively reading stories about the failure of Romney's Orca. Successful computer programs are made of people!)
Scheherazade's Façade: Fantastical Tales of Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Transformation, ed. Michael M. Jones: A fair number of mermaids/mermaid-type creatures in this collection, where genderbending often overlaps with mythical creaturedom. The best story, by Sarah Rees Brennan, features a dragon and a reminder that transformations are dangerous and not always welcome, even when they feel necessary.
Jim C. Hines, Libriomancer (Magic ex Libris, Book One): Isaac is a libriomancer, able to call objects out of books. Popularity can also make phenomena in books real, resulting among other things in the rise of a new, sparkly vampire species. When war breaks out between the libriomancers and the vampires, Isaac-benched for misusing his magic-becomes central to figuring out why and how to stop it, even as the consequences of overuse of magic threaten his health and sanity. Also, there’s a nonexclusive romance with a dryad, and a spider that sets things on fire. (The comma there is important.) It was well enough constructed, but didn’t grab me; still, if you like the idea of reaching into a book and pulling out any object therein, from magic-sensing glasses to the One Ring, you might give this urban fantasy a try.
Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth: All of a sudden, most people-starting with kids-can, with readily made equipment and a potato for a battery, cross over into alternate Earths with no people on them. There’s an apparently infinite series to the “west” and to the “east,” reachable one step at a time. Yes, nausea results, and you can’t take iron across worlds, but other than that it’s easy. Society changes fairly rapidly as a result, in ways good and bad (I didn’t find it particularly plausible that certain crimes didn’t rise much, though some countermeasures-digging basements or putting valuable stuff/people high up, so either way crossing over would be difficult/impossible-made sense, though it did raise unanswered questions about what happened to a person who happened to step into an occupied space). A natural stepper, Joshua, is recruited for a secret project by a computer holding the consciousness of a Tibetan mechanic, investigating a mystery far out across the Earths. There were plenty of interesting ideas, but very few of them got worked out, and the story just stopped at the end of the book, so overall I can’t rank it high among Pratchett’s work.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.