No time to sit down with a nice fat novel but you like to read? Just got a bad case of ADD and don’t want to try to read page after page, not even a whole paragraph? Twitter to the rescue. What twitter did to blogs is now being done to stories.
I am currently aware of two edited twitter zines. @thaumatrope and @Outshine. They both deal in speculative fiction type stuff so that is right up my alley.
And as a bonus – do you think you could be the next great 140 character or less author? Well both will pay for accepted submissions. If you are interested check out the submissions guidelines for each. It looks like thaumatrope bills themselves as the highest paying zine on twitter. They pay $1.20 per accepted submission. And Outshine shells out five bucks per accepted submission – which they call prose poems. (So I guess thaumatrope should drop the highest paying claim.) They also take poem poems apparently, such as haiku. Outshine officially launches tomorrow. (January 14th, 2009) thaumatrope has been going for a while and is pretty sweet.
Browsing Posts in Sci-Fi
If you fill out the form at Tor.com they will send you an email a week, with a link to download a free e-book from one of their authors. You also become entered in a drawing to win an Asus eee PC Galaxy. Not bad. There will be, I think, 12 ebooks total. They come as PDFs with no DRM. Nice.
When I was in junior high, I came down with a rather nasty case of strep throat. I was out of school for a couple weeks (I think). The important thing is that, while I was home sick, my mom was incredible. She really tried to make it as best for me as she could. I would want something to eat or drink and she would run out to get it. On her own she also went to a local used book store and got some stuff for me to read. In that bag of books was a boxed set containing Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. The three paperbacks inside don’t have a date that they were printed, I’m guessing sometime in the 70s. They have some really neat artwork on the box and on each of the books. Those were the first books by Asimov that I had read. I’d read some of his short stories – but these were the first books. They are a part of my collection that I return to on a regular basis. Getting sick was worth getting those books.
When we went to Arizona this summer, I packed “Foundation” for the plane. I knew I’d be busy with the kids, so I wanted something short that I knew pretty well. As it happened, I didn’t even get it out. I did end up with some free time in Phoenix, and read it then.
Last week I had the flu and read “Foundation and Empire”. I think Foundation is my favorite of the three. Asimov had such great skill in weaving these stories that were like a jigsaw puzzle or something. You could see him lay out all the parts and then watch as they smoothly slid into place. His genius has been widely recognized, and I think the acclaim he garnered was deserved.
I’ll try and knock out “Second Foundation” in the next couple weeks or so. I’m healthy now, so that will take longer. I read part of one of the novels that came after the original three, but never made it all the way through. Maybe I’ll try again. I don’t even remember why I stopped reading – but I mustn’t have liked it much because usually once I start a book, I finish it, even if I don’t like it.
The Foundation books are classic and phenomenal science fiction. If you haven’t read them, I can’t recommend them enough. The scope is across galaxies and centuries. There is intrigue, action and strategy that is intricate while believable. My copy of Second Foundation that I just checked shows the copyright as 1953. I think it is a testament to the books that reading them now, they do not have the dated feel that a lot of Sci-Fi from the fifties has. This is in part because the descriptions of technology are rather generic, but also because they were so far out beyond what a lot of others were writing about at the time. (But also rooted in some rather timeless themes in regards to humanity at the same time.) Just solid stuff in my opinion.
Every once in a while (not often, just once in a while) I’ll be talking to somebody about my educational background, what I do, etc. and they will say something like ‘Wow you must know a lot about X’ where X is something I’ve studied or done. That always makes me laugh – because I don’t really know a lot about anything. The more I do learn about anything, the more I realize how little I know.
I’m thinking about this because today I jumped over the Apple trailer site to see what there was to see. I ran across the trailer for I am Legend. Here’s where my ignorance comes in. I immediately thought – man, that sure looks like a remake of The Omega Man. I’m familiar with that film because it was a Saturday morning Sci-fi theater staple when I was a kid. I’ve seen it a ton of times and thought it was pretty cool. There’s something cool (in a twisted, romanticized way that I’m sure wouldn’t be reflected in reality) about the whole idea of everybody gone and the total freedom to do as you please. I can’t be alone as the idea pops up all over the place. But anyway – I figured it sure looked to be a remake of Omega Man, but I couldn’t figure out why they would change the name. (See what I mean by ignorance?) So I googled and come to find out that the original is a book (never knew that) and the proper title is I am Legend. Apparently this new film will be more like Omega Man than the book. I need to read the book but from the description at Wikipedia, that might not be a bad thing. Wil Smith is a great actor and has done quite a bit of science fiction. I’m glad they have him in this role instead of Arnold.
Well, the film is supposed to be out in December. Should be fun.
I just finished reading Heinlein’s Space Cadet
It is such a great story. It really is up their on my list of RAH books. This is one of his juveniles- written in 1948. It is the story of Matt Dodson – from his testing to get into the Space Patrol, through his first training cruise. It dovetails nicely (though I’ve been in extended debate over this point with another RAH fan) with Starship Troopers. Many similar elements can be found in how Heinlein viewed selection of candidates for service and then the training process. There are also similarities in how each character deals with that training, their ups and downs, getting over the ‘hump’ and the realization that they have been transformed into something that is no longer a civilian. While Starship Troopers’ protagonist is an expert in waging war, Matt is learning how to be an expert in attempting to avoid war. He is a diplomat that tries to deal from a position of strength and wisdom. This fits well with Heinlein’s libertarian ideals.
Cadet Dodson is similar to many of the protagonists in Heinlein’s juvenile works. He is naive, but in a good way. He is intelligent and learns quickly. He likes girls, but has consciously decided to set them aside to persue the higher goals of doing what is best for mankind. (And let me qualify that these characteristics are common in the Juveniles – not the later, adult material. Which is obvious if you are familiar with all his work, but I don’t want someone to pick up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
One thing that is different between this book and troopers though – is that there is much less exposition of RAH’s ideas about mankind and morality. The extensive time in the classroom in Troopers is not present in Cadet. Some of that is present but not to the same extent. The story moves quickly and has some great action.
There are of course some ideas that are there because of the time the book was written. Venus is a colonized planet with sentient natives and a tropical climate. Slide rules are still in use. Computer time means getting time on a mainframe type machine. There are sentient natives on Mars as well. These issues may bother some, I find them to make the story all that much more fun. I’m sure if RAH were to be alive, writing the novel today, he would have pushed the context out into another system, rather than include things so innacurate about our own.
There is some great humor in this story. I think some of RAH’s best and exists on multiple levels. A great quote that any geek should love is this, (a main character is working with some ancient hardware built in the 1900s)“Not only were the electronic circuits…vastly more complicated and equally less efficient than the gear he had been brought up with but the nomenclature was different – the markings for example, on a simple resistor were Greek to him.” (I’ve dropped a couple words to avoid spoiler.)
The antagonist, as in many of the RAH books, has the primary fault of arrogance teamed with ignorance. I get the feeling that Mr. Heinlein really couldn’t stand these types of people – which is understandable. I’m not a big fan either. But the focus is more just on Matt’s journey and the ‘bad guy’ if you want to call him that is just part of the passing scenery in this tale.
It is so hard for me to rate Heinlein’s books against one another – but this stands right up there with his very best. It is also very accesible to the person who may not be into sci-fi. There isn’t nearly as much time spent on technical details as in some of his other stories. This and Citizen of the Galaxy
The other day I finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune
Why do I read it over and over? Well it is just such an incredibly good book. I enjoy the next two in the series as well (Dune Messiah and Children of Dune
I think one of the draws, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, is that I so badly want Paul’s father to be rescued, and there are those moments when it almost happens. That ache is one of the things that pulls me back. I don’t think I really understood that when I was younger , even as I felt it. Many of my other favorite novels share that type of event. A real sense of loss I guess you could call it. It pulls the reader in, I think, and really involves them in the story.
The depiction of Arakis is also another draw. The great desert planet and the giant sandworms. They were cool to me when I was a kid and they still are. It is interesting, the culture that Herbert chose for the Fremen. I think this is especially true in the light of current events. I don’t want to read too much into it, but their ferocity in war, their willingness to sacrafice themselves and their cavalier attitude towards killing seem to draw some eerie parallels to certain groups at work in the world today. This comparison is especcially difficult to avoid after reading about the Fremen remembering that they were denied the hajj and that they will never forgive or forget.
The complexity of the tail is also what makes it worth reading multiple times. The Harkonnens are pretty much evil bad guys, and Paul is pretty much a hero, but it is not too cut and dried. Are the Bene Gesseret evil or ignorant? Is the Emperor a bad guy or the product of his environment? Everyone has multiple shades of good and bad to them and this seems to be a much more reflection of what human beings really are. We are complex creatures, rarely as simple as in the movies or other forms of fiction.
I think another big draw is the idea of human potential. Humanity, having turned it’s back on computers that behave like the human mind, has pushed the human mind itself, to new heights. A part of this is gaining control of the body, and so people are almost super-human in their abilities. I think that for the reader, there is an allure of what might be possible.
I don’t have a set date on when I will read it again, but I’m already looking forward to it.
Well, I thought about it last year, but I am participating in the National Novel Writing Month. (If you click on that any time near when I post this, it may take a while to load. The site is getting hammered as things get close to starting.) The goal is to write 50,000 words between November 1st and 30th. It is a light-hearted fun thing.
I have an idea for my story. I’ve got an outline, and some pretty broad ideas of where things will go. The emphasis is on quantity over quality and if I am going to make the goal, that will most assuredly be the case. I don’t have tons of time for this, so when I can write, I’m going to have to really knock stuff out. So it isn’t going to be pretty. Which may then introduce the question, “Then why are you doing it?” Well really just for one reason. I think it is going to be fun.
Becoming a published author takes a lot of work. To be a successful author takes that and a whole bunch of other stuff. Me, I have no desire to go through all that. I have other priorities. But I enjoy creating and I’ve always wanted to write a story all the way through. I’ve started plenty of times but never finished. I’m hoping this will help me to at least once finish. If it isn’t fun, I can just stop. So it should be good.
I’ll be posting through the month as I make progress. (Oh and if you are already tracking another author at the site — my handle there is ’stoolpigeon’ – the book is “Functional Eclipse”
