agent of buffoonery

[makyo]

Over the past few months, johnaldis and I have been cataloguing the Warwick SF&F Society library. The library (which consisted of about 1500 books last time anyone counted) has a fairly diverse collection of books, ranging from modern classics of the genre, right through to utter drivel. Some of the latter is "of its time" - tat by today's standards, but

Comments

[cdave]

:D

Are you going to stick the catalogue online? I'd like to see what I missed out on.

Librarything can import ISBNs easily.

[makyo]

Yes, we're about a third of the way through the collection at the moment, and the catalogue is here.

[queex]

I wish librarything existed when I catalogued it.

[d_floorlandmine]

[snork]

[makyo]

It does conjure up some particularly entertaining images, doesn't it?

[d_floorlandmine]

Is the leader of the Hegemony called Ken?

[makyo]

Alas, not as far as I can tell. However, according to Dave Langford, John Prescott turns up in A E van Vogt's book The World of Null-A.

[blue_condition]

It is a monumentally crap novel. I have it.

The only thing I can say is it's far, far, FAR better than The Solarians.

However Big Norm then wrote The Men In The Jungle which is utterly and totally fabbo.

[makyo]

It is a monumentally crap novel. I have it.
In a fit of curiosity, I've borrowed the society's copy, but haven't got around to reading it yet - Tom Holt's Barking and Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9 Tail Fox seemed more likely prospects :)

[blue_condition]

I'd sooner read Connie Willis than re-read Agent of Chaos. And I'd sooner have my balls slowly hacked off with a blunt instrument than read her idea-free soap-opera witterings.

[makyo]

I'm pretty sure you don't have to do any of those things if you don't want to.

[makyo]

Ooh that'd be splendid, and extremely kind of you - thanks very much indeed. Drop me a line when you're ready and we can arrange to collect them.

[blue_condition]

My spare room has a few hundred sf paperbacks that I'm unlikely to want to read again, at some point I'll have a sort-out - if you have suitable transport to lug them back from York!

[medains]

I seem to recall writing a little story in my long-forgotten youth, which I showed to my Mum. She pointed out that my hideously evil bad guy had the same name as Princess Anne's husband - Mark Phillips! I took it badly.

[makyo]

There was a Hollywood psycho-thriller called Double Jeopardy which came out several years ago. The premise was that the central character (played, I think, by Ashley Judd) had been convicted and imprisoned for the murder of her husband. Except that actually the husband had faked his own death and run off with someone else and millions of dollars of someone else's money (or something like that).

All very standard Hollywood psycho-thriller fare, except that unfortunately the writers hadn't been quite careful enough when choosing names for the principal characters, with the result that the evil, scheming, criminal mastermind villain ex-husband was called Nicholas Parsons.

Now obviously this wasn't a problem for American audiences, but I (and, I suspect, anyone else who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s) was unable to take the film entirely seriously due to an almost overwhelming desire to yell "And now, from Norwich, it's the quiz of the week!" whenever the bad guy turned up.