it am rob’s birthday! (plus or minus, but mostly minus) about an hour. i celebrated by spending the day at work, after which i came home, logged into my office PC via the interweb and spent three hours updating reports on my day’s activities… hurrah! i dedicate the day’s work to you, Wonderful Small, on the possibly misguided premise that there’s only a finite amount of work that can be done in one day, so if i was doing some of it that probably ipso facto meant there was less free-floating work free-floating about that could impose itself on you on your birthday… in other words, i bet darth so-called vader never stood a chance.
luckily — i had the foresight to purchase rob’s birthday present several weeks back, while i was still labouring under the illusion that rob’s birthday occured towards the end of the month before this one… (& yes, i’m pretty sure taking action as a result of being mistaken on the specifics of actual dates counts as foresight…)
time, not been kind — we watched ghostbusters a couple of weekends back… it was much funnier the first time… who ya gonna call? i call shenanigans.
attention lazyweb: book recs, please — assume for the moment that i’ve read & for the most part enjoyed (we’re talking sci-fi here, with a tinge of fantasy) the collected works of banks (ian m.), stephenson (neale), hamilton (peter f.), gibson (william), mieville (china), tolkien (j.r.r.r.r.), morgan (richard), robinson (kim stanley) and pratchett (terry). any suggestions on where to look next? space opera, preferable. cyberpunk not dismissed out of hand. no sword-slinging &/or sorcerous fifteen volume tediously generic timewasters please. (unless, you know, they’re rooly, rooly good.)
I’m coming up a blank. I’d recommend George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, which is a big, sprawling low-fantasy epic type thing – well written with lots of warring nobles houses, hideously nasty people being vengeful, careless and fatally noble by turns – but it does have the aforementioned swords and at least a bit of sorcery (which increases as the series goes on). Lots of characters, never dwells on any one for more than 20 or 30 pages at a time, for those of us with a low boredom threshold. Plus people die all over the place, occasionally extremely surprisingly. So that’s good.
So, yeah, if no-one can come up with any better suggestions, take a look at the first one “A Game of Thrones”.
Dave — Sunday, 25 February 2007 @ 07:37 am
G.R.R. Martin? this series doesn’t feature characters called grodo & baragorn does it? i’ve got a bad feeling about this… on the other hand, i always wondered what he did after the beatles split up… i think i remember seeing Roy & H.G review A Game of Thrones… or maybe i’m confusing it with something else…
still, it’s gotta be better than reading nothing at all, right? (a question you’d think i would’ve learned not to ask after recently (& quite unsuspectingly) picking up my first ever orson scott card novel… ender’s dog, or something like that… it sucked & blew at the same time… i thought it would never end(er)…)
thank you mr the dave, check it out i will…
ted — Sunday, 25 February 2007 @ 04:23 pm
Doris Lessing’s series of 5, begins with “Shikasta”.
The series is “Canopus In Argos: Archives”.
Book 1: Shikasta
Book 2: The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
Book 3: The Sirian Experiments
Book 4: The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Book 5: The Sentimental Agents
When we had to cull our book collection I parted with 4 of them, but I couldn’t part with Book 4.
Now I’m jealous of you,
I wish I hadn’t read them already.
polly
polly — Monday, 26 February 2007 @ 01:03 pm
I expect you’ve already read these, but since you don’t mention him, there’s the Hyperion/Endymion series by Dan Simmons. If you have read (and enjoyed) them, he’s got a new series out called Ilium about spaceTroy or somesuch. Haven’t read them myself, but I intend to at some point.
Das Simonster — Monday, 26 February 2007 @ 05:49 pm
thankee mr das simonster. alas & alack, despite his non-appearance in my hastily cobbled together list of authors what i have read, i am indeed more than passingly familiar with the works of mr simmons… & my copies of the spaceTroy books (gods go crazy on Mars! with quantum!) were last seen disappearing into rob’s backpack, accompanied by the sound of much whining about how heavy they were…
ted — Thursday, 01 March 2007 @ 04:07 am
And they’ve been so heavy that I haven’t lifted them of the bedside. But I will. After all ewoks in the universe have been exterminated. This may take a while.
winstoninabox — Friday, 02 March 2007 @ 11:08 am
Possibly another in the “Gleesh, doesn’t he know that everyone’s read that!” category, but you could try Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, which is space opera-y and junk.
Das Simonster — Saturday, 03 March 2007 @ 02:57 pm
guten morgen meine kleine simonster… i’m gonna hafta file that one under “Gleesh,” i’m afraid… i had a go at the Vernor a few years back, & found it to be more junk than space opera-y as i recall… mebbe i should give it a second chance?
at present, however, second chances for that will hafta wait. el davebot scores full marks for his G.R.R.R.R. Martin rec… i was moderately discouraged when amazon quoted me six weeks delivery on a game of thrones, but then i happened upon thrones & the second book on the shelf of one of the local english language bookstores… not put off by the (ooh! a) dragon on the cover of thrones, & working on the premise that fantasy epic serieses sometimes don’t hit their stride until somewhere around page 1600, i snaffled them both…
i’m partway through thrones now & pleasantly surprised – it hit stride about 1599 pages ahead of schedule… in fact, i’m thinking about ordering the third one (am i correct in thinking it’s called a right pack of utter bastards?) in the hope amazon can get it to me before i finish the second one…
p.s. ewoks are a plague. a cutesy, furry plague armed with rocks & pointy sticks. kill them. kill them all. no prisoners.
p.p.s. i was also thinking about having a go at the gormenghast books… haven’t read those since i left high school & remember being gothickally impressed (in more ways than one) by them… anyone happened to look at those in relatively recent years?
ted — Sunday, 04 March 2007 @ 12:28 am
Mmmhph. May I suggest Alastair Reynolds? Revelation space, Chasm City and Century Rain top of the list.
Otherwise Charles Stross – His Lexifabness commented on Accelerando which is trippy, but Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise weren’t too bad.
Also – Tad Williams – did a one-shot (thank god) War of the Flowers.
dave — Saturday, 10 March 2007 @ 09:22 pm