Jo Walton (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} papersky) wrote,@ 2005-12-12 21:02:00 |
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Cards, Shopping, Books, and More Books.
I have made Christmas cards, and sent most of them. As every year recently, I have also worried that people will think that now Zorinth is 15 the quality of cards should have improved from when he was a small child. (When he was a small child I used to comfort myself that they'd think he was only six, or whatever. In fact, when he was younger my cards were much more ambitious, because he would actually help. These days I have to do it all myself. ) I've sent most of them, too. I hope they get there in time.
I went out in the Christmas-card snow and (minus ten) cold today and turned uprezendi's heating, because it isn't predicted to get any warmer for a while and I was worried about it. While I was out I did some shopping. I
have bought warm clothes forfivemack for when he is here at New Year briefly between Bali and Britain -- a fleece shirt, a sweater, and a fleece tabard thing. As a bonus, I found a fleece shirt, a purply-blue silk shirt and a check shirt for me. I also found a pair of warm black pants, with pockets, which I bought without trying on because I was sure they were big enough... only to find when I got home that they were too big. (Perhaps I am not a hippopotoperson yet. Perhaps I am a thin person, deceived about body-shape by the media. I don't think so, but wouldn't it be nice!) All these clothes came from Fripe-Prix, next to De Castellnau metro, for a total of $27. This is how I buy clothes.
There's a book section in that Fripe, but not a very productive one. One of the things we have in Montreal is bookshops where the books are all in French, except for one small section labelled "Anglais" as if it were a genre, and containing the oddest mixture of books, lying there like flotsam, whose only connection with each other is that they are all in English. They're often best-sellers, some of them even SF, but lying next to weird old text-books and What to Expect When You're Expecting. Someone wrote them and someone published them expecting someone would buy them, and someone did buy them but they didn't stick, and somehow they went floating round and round and washed up there.
I have read some brilliant books recently. Let me unreservedly recommend Ursula Le Guin's The Birthday of the World, which contains perhaps the best generation starship story ever, "Paradises Lost". I've had this book lying around for months, maybe even a year, because I bought it thinking "I have read all these stories in magazines, but it will be more convenient to have them in a book". I was wrong, there was a new story and what a good one. I don't want to say anything about it that might be a spoiler. Read it now. The rest of the collection is well worth reading too.
Also terrific, John Scalzi's Old Man's War. It's a Heinlein juvenile, written with the sharp smartass first-person Zelazny did so well. It's in the same small genre as Starship Troopers and The Forever War and it's smooth, polished, and just tons of fun. Read it fast and don't ask questions about the scientific absurdities, because they're really beside the point with a story like this. Phenomenal pacing of revelation which kept me reading as fast as I could go. I loved it.
Slightly less wonderful, but only because I was expecting so much, was Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, a novel set in the universe of "Fast Times At Fairmount High". It's very good indeed, brilliant even, full of ideas, great characters, but it isn't A Deepness in the Sky. (I don't think this is out yet. I have an ARC.) It's a fascinating take on aging, and on the keeping up required of the rejuvenated in a fast-moving world.
Another take on long life, and for that matter on generation starships, is Ken MacLeod's Learning the World. It has great characters, and absolutely believable but alien aliens. This is one of those books everyone should read and have as part of their common vocabulary of SF.
I bought Geoff Ryman's Air at Interthingy, which was just as well because it doesn't seem to be very available in the wider world. I'd suggest getting hold of it from Amazon UK or other online book source, because you want to read it. The world is getting the internet in their heads, but the story is set in the Third World, in a place... in a person... in two people who aren't living in a very modern futuristic world at all, who are all the same standing at the intersection of what it is to be human and dealing with the past and the future. It's also sweet and funny. Probably my favourite Ryman ever, and one of the best books I've ever read.
I read Karl Schroeder's Permanence because I'd met him a couple of times and thought he was a nice guy. This method of book selection almost always nets me good things to read. I originally, years ago, discovered Ryman the same way. Permanence is a space opera, an interplanetary adventure, and something SF's quite short of, a fairly hard science future developed with slow FTL. There are also aliens, ideas, characters, tech problems as fast FTL makes slow FTL obsolete, and a chase across space. It's lots of fun, and thought provoking too. I shall be looking out eagerly for the rest of Schroeder's work.
I have made Christmas cards, and sent most of them. As every year recently, I have also worried that people will think that now Zorinth is 15 the quality of cards should have improved from when he was a small child. (When he was a small child I used to comfort myself that they'd think he was only six, or whatever. In fact, when he was younger my cards were much more ambitious, because he would actually help. These days I have to do it all myself. ) I've sent most of them, too. I hope they get there in time.
I went out in the Christmas-card snow and (minus ten) cold today and turned up
rezendi's heating, because it isn't predicted to get any warmer for a while and I was worried about it. While I was out I did some shopping. I have bought warm clothes for
fivemack for when he is here at New Year briefly between Bali and Britain -- a fleece shirt, a sweater, and a fleece tabard thing. As a bonus, I found a fleece shirt, a purply-blue silk shirt and a check shirt for me. I also found a pair of warm black pants, with pockets, which I bought without trying on because I was sure they were big enough... only to find when I got home that they were too big. (Perhaps I am not a hippopotoperson yet. Perhaps I am a thin person, deceived about body-shape by the media. I don't think so, but wouldn't it be nice!) All these clothes came from Fripe-Prix, next to De Castellnau metro, for a total of $27. This is how I buy clothes.There's a book section in that Fripe, but not a very productive one. One of the things we have in Montreal is bookshops where the books are all in French, except for one small section labelled "Anglais" as if it were a genre, and containing the oddest mixture of books, lying there like flotsam, whose only connection with each other is that they are all in English. They're often best-sellers, some of them even SF, but lying next to weird old text-books and What to Expect When You're Expecting. Someone wrote them and someone published them expecting someone would buy them, and someone did buy them but they didn't stick, and somehow they went floating round and round and washed up there.
I have read some brilliant books recently. Let me unreservedly recommend Ursula Le Guin's The Birthday of the World, which contains perhaps the best generation starship story ever, "Paradises Lost". I've had this book lying around for months, maybe even a year, because I bought it thinking "I have read all these stories in magazines, but it will be more convenient to have them in a book". I was wrong, there was a new story and what a good one. I don't want to say anything about it that might be a spoiler. Read it now. The rest of the collection is well worth reading too.
Also terrific, John Scalzi's Old Man's War. It's a Heinlein juvenile, written with the sharp smartass first-person Zelazny did so well. It's in the same small genre as Starship Troopers and The Forever War and it's smooth, polished, and just tons of fun. Read it fast and don't ask questions about the scientific absurdities, because they're really beside the point with a story like this. Phenomenal pacing of revelation which kept me reading as fast as I could go. I loved it.
Slightly less wonderful, but only because I was expecting so much, was Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, a novel set in the universe of "Fast Times At Fairmount High". It's very good indeed, brilliant even, full of ideas, great characters, but it isn't A Deepness in the Sky. (I don't think this is out yet. I have an ARC.) It's a fascinating take on aging, and on the keeping up required of the rejuvenated in a fast-moving world.
Another take on long life, and for that matter on generation starships, is Ken MacLeod's Learning the World. It has great characters, and absolutely believable but alien aliens. This is one of those books everyone should read and have as part of their common vocabulary of SF.
I bought Geoff Ryman's Air at Interthingy, which was just as well because it doesn't seem to be very available in the wider world. I'd suggest getting hold of it from Amazon UK or other online book source, because you want to read it. The world is getting the internet in their heads, but the story is set in the Third World, in a place... in a person... in two people who aren't living in a very modern futuristic world at all, who are all the same standing at the intersection of what it is to be human and dealing with the past and the future. It's also sweet and funny. Probably my favourite Ryman ever, and one of the best books I've ever read.
I read Karl Schroeder's Permanence because I'd met him a couple of times and thought he was a nice guy. This method of book selection almost always nets me good things to read. I originally, years ago, discovered Ryman the same way. Permanence is a space opera, an interplanetary adventure, and something SF's quite short of, a fairly hard science future developed with slow FTL. There are also aliens, ideas, characters, tech problems as fast FTL makes slow FTL obsolete, and a chase across space. It's lots of fun, and thought provoking too. I shall be looking out eagerly for the rest of Schroeder's work.
