I’m currently rebuilding the website as the old one got totally messed up when i was playing around with things (no idea what happened).
So i thought that while it was a total clusterfuck mess of SQL, i would take the opportunity to give it a whole new life and everything.
So if you go clicking on things you might find that very strange things happen. Don’t moan, i know a lot of things are broken, i’m working on it, it takes time.
I’ve got tons of old posts and pages from three websites that i’m working through and will be gradually posting all the stuff i want to keep on here while fixing all the broken things as i go through, one post, one page, at a time.
On top of doing all that, i will, of course, be continuing to add more new content and my latest posts will always appear directly below.
Or, if you prefer, you can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest where i put a link to all new posts.
Enjoy
Gourmet Rhapsody — Muriel Barbery
Although translated one year after The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this is actually Muriel’s first book and was published in French 6 years before. And that’s why i read it first.
I’m in two frames of mind about this book, my first one is that it’s an incredibly well written descriptive narrative that i thoroughly enjoyed, especially being a life long foody myself, to the point i found myself happily picking it up at every spare minute to read some more. However, my other frame of mind comes from my utter contempt for people who look at food as a medium for art when the best part of i billion people don’t get enough calories every day while many many more get absolutely no choice what to eat and very rarely have access to a full range of essential nutrients. At the same time, over 1 billion other people in the privileged developed world gorge themselves on highly processed foods to an obesity epidemic (creating an obscene amount of waste while doing so). A system of food preparation, presentation, advertising and marketing that caters for nothing but a ridiculous conception of what good food is. This system being pushed wholesale through advertising and television cookery programs: Master Chef being a prime example.
Good food is as it comes from the ground with the most minimal processing, just enough processing to maximise the digestion of the nutrients, and each meal should aim to be completely nutritionally balanced. Instead we have these so called master chefs, critics and their sycophants parading food on television that bears no resemblance to reality, is nutritionally corrupt in the extreme and does nothing but titillate people’s mouths and give them a spike of neurotransmitters that they fallaciously perceive as delicious while fuelling a pandemic of obesity and chronic diseases, causing years of suffering before sending them all to an early grave.
So yeah, i loved the writing and enjoyed reading it, but i really hated the main protagonist’s attitude to food, life and everything: the only thing he didn’t treat with utter contempt was his own gluttony and i was quite pleased when he died without the choux pastry he wanted so much.
Anyways, i’m certainly looking forward to reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Muriel’s Page
#murielbarbery
Tiger, Burning — Alastair Reynolds
You’ll find this in Deep Navigation.
It seems that someone’s been leaking top secret information from a top secret facility in a different reality and a detective is sent to investigate. The only problem being that the only way to get there is to have his consciousness uploaded and sent by signal and then put into a new body at the other end: exactly like in Altered Carbon. But for some reason the detective finds himself re-sleeved into a bit cat’s body: hence the title Tiger, Burning.
Really good, Alastair at his best, as usual.
Next up in Alastair’s timeline will be Signal to Noise, from 2006.
Alastair’s Page
#scifi #alastairreynolds
The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard — David A. Goodman
Very much similar to The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway that i read two books ago.
Thoroughly enjoyable look back at Jean-Luc’s early life before the Enterprise, and also some good snippets from the series and afterwards also.
Another must for Trekkies everywhere.
David’s Page
#autobiography #scifi #startrek #davidagoodman
Messenger — R.R. Virdi and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
After the aliens invade people have their consciousnesses uploaded into giant avatar machines of Hindu gods to fight the alien invaders. What happens when ordinary humans are given the physical bodies of gods?
A good little story.
Yudhanjaya’s Page
#scifi #rrvirdi #yudhanjayawijeratne
Will I Live to See My Utopia? — P. Djèlí Clark
Inspired by the TV show Watchmen. You can read it over at Uncanny.
An interesting and thought provoking essay by one of my favourite writers. Djèlí is a historian by day and he provides lots of links for you to learn things with.
And for those of you who haven’t watched Watchmen yet, then seriously get the fuck out from under that rock you’ve been living under and turn the computer on and find it. Seriously good TV.
P. Djèlí Clark’s Page
#watchmen #tv
Feeling Rejected — Alastair Reynolds
You’ll find this in the collection, Deep Navigation.
Reading this, one wonders if Alastair once had an academic paper rejected and that this is somehow a therapy session. There doesn’t seem to be much more to it.
Dyson spheres: a wonderful trope for story telling, but the idea that an actual intelligent society capable of such feats would go to all that trouble simply because they can’t control their urges to continually fuck up the front hole, producing ever expanding colonies of the results of the misguided sexual desires, just because a few seriously backward thinking Homo sapiens can’t see beyond their own retarded thinking and retarded sexual desires, is preposterous.
And the idea that we should be judging the amount — and level — of intelligent species in the galaxy on the amount of Dyson spheres we can detect is even more preposterous. Just one more example of the arrogance of Homo sapiens.
Alastair’s Page
#scifi #alastairreynolds
Pushing Ice — Alastair Reynolds
Another one of those super long 10000+ Loc point novels that Alastair seems to enjoy writing.
The story starts with an ice pusher, named Rockhopper. Rockhopper is a big space ship that finds valuable comets, etc., around the solar system, attaches big mass drivers to them and pushes them wherever they’re needed in the solar system for their materials: ergo “Pushing Ice”. It just so happens that Rockhopper ends up as the only space ship owned by the big corporations that is capable of catching up with one of Saturn’s moons that has just decided to fly away from Saturn and the rest of the solar system.
And thus begins the big chase, with mutinies, murders, aliens, and all kinds of other mayhem thrown in for good measure: did i mention there’s 10000+ Loc points of this?
It does begin fairly slow going but as you go along it all picks up speed as the stakes become higher and higher and by the last third of the book i was in couldn’t-put-it-down mode, turning pages at any brief opportunity life presented.
Super good, and it’s also left very well open for another episode should Alastair ever wish to let us have some more: please can we have some more, Alastair?
And next book on the Alastair time line will be Feeling Rejected, from 2005.
Alastair’s Page
#scifi #alastairreynolds
The Frost on Jade Buds — Aliette de Bodard
When i first read all the Xuya stories i didn’t have a copy of this one because i refused to be ridiculed by some luddite (whoever dictates the pricing for the Solaris Rising anthologies) with their ridiculous pricing tactics, so, sadly, i just had to skip over it in the timeline. But i never stopped hoping that one day Aliette would take back control and release this in a more reasonably priced, ebook, alternative, and she did: thank you Aliette! 
You can find this in the collection The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun and Other Stories, and hopefully like me you’ll just stop whatever it is that you’re doing and dive straight back into the Xuya-verse and get some reading done. This has been a long time coming.
My other thought was that i really needed to reacquaint myself with the series before beginning this story, so i jumped back one story to A Slow Unfurling of Truth and re-read that to settle back in. And i have to say, i’m really glad i did.
While the Xuya stories jump around the galaxy quite a lot, you do occasionally get two or three books that run in a sort of mini-series, and The Frost on Jade Buds certainly follows on wonderfully from A Slow Unfurling of Truth.
What struck me this time with A Slow Unfurling of Truth that i didn’t pick up on last time is how much of these stories are influenced by Aliette’s heritage. One can see so many similarities between Earth’s Western countries and the Galactics lining up against Earth’s Eastern countries being represented by the Scattered Pearls Belt: a daughter with one parent from each caught between. Both books are brilliantly written and a must read as a pair.
All i can hope for now is some more Xuya books to fill the later years of my life: such a great universe. Meanwhile, i’m definitely planning to begin reading the rest of Aliette’s other stories once i’ve finished reading all of P. Djèlí Clark’s books (only three of those to go).
Aliette’s Page
#scifi #aliettedebodard
Lily, the Immortal — Kylie Lee Baker
A rather good, thought provoking story concerning internet celebrities and what may happen to them after they die.
Imagine if some big corporation somehow obtained the rights to the social media channel, used all those hundreds of hours of footage to produce a deep fake, and then continued to use that celebrity for their own marketing purposes in whatever way they chose. And what about the loved ones left behind?
Best of all, you can read it for free over at Uncanny Magazine. There’s a podcast version but it doesn’t really work as the lesbian narrator of the story is being read by a man. It’s like getting a white cis-gender heterosexual to play a black transgender lesbian in a film.
Kylie’s Page
#kylieleebaker
Everlasting — Alastair Reynolds
You’ll find this in the collection, Zima Blue and Other Stories.
This is one of those
I take from this story that Alastair also thinks
Alastair’s Page
#scifi #alastairreynolds
Fiction
. . .me thinks it’s a good time to re-read Asimov.
Nonfiction
Nonfiction
