Tag Archives: fiction

There Be Dragons: my 2022-2023 fantasy journey

Stop reading here if you don’t care about my fantasy (novel reading) journey. I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings probably as a pre-teen in the late 1980s or so, and loved every minute of them. I was talking to a young person recently who has not read them and does not have any interest in them, and it kind of made me sad. I would not be the same person if I had not read them. Sadly, I don’t think anyone else can ever live up to Tolkien’s legacy, not even authors who put “R.R.” in their names and then don’t finish their books (I liked Ice and Fire as far as it went and I hope it eventually concludes). But anyway, here’s what I’ve read over the past year or so.

The Silmarillion: I finally went back and read this. I supposed it was in the back of my mind from the recent Amazon series (which I thought was decent and hope will continue) and from the mention of it in Ready Player Two. The Silmarillion is long and somewhat hard to read, but it really helped me appreciate the incredible depth of the fantasy world that Tolkien created. Long as it is, I did not appreciate before that the Silmarillion is only a summary of the incredibly deep alternate universe Tolkien created. He must have spent more time in that alternate universe than in this one. An interesting thing about the Silmarillion is the idea of a mischievous creator god who created evil on purpose. Was this for his amusement. He also created humans and elves, and we eventually learn that humans return to be with him after death. Elves do not die from old age or disease, but they die in battle, but they go somewhere but they don’t get to be with the creator god. Dwarves were created by a lower level of gods akin to angels, without the creator god’s permission. Orcs were created by the evil demon-like god in “mockery” of the elves.

Earthsea: I read the five-part Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve heard this described as “the other” great fantasy series of the 20th century. Maybe, but not on a par with Tolkien. I liked it.

Land Fit for Heroes: Since I love Altered Carbon, I will read anything by Richard K. Morgan. I enjoyed this, although I found the ending leaving me to piece some things together on my own, in a classic William Gibson move. Well, Morgan is clearly Gibson-inspired.

What to Middle Earth, Ice and Fire, Earthsea, and Land Fit for Heroes all have in common? DRAGONS!!! So I learned that Rule #1 of fantasy writing, should I ever choose to undertake it, is there have to be dragons.

Longreads.com “best of #5”

How can #5 be the best, you ask? Longreads picks a “top 5” posts each week, and #5 is typically something whimsical or offbeat. There are some real doozies here! such as…

  • The Secret MVP of Sports? The Port-a-Potty Yes, a long read about portable restroom facilities.
  • The Undoing of Joss Whedon Just another a Hollywood producer-rapist type, apparently and unfortunately. I could care less about Buffy, but I am a Firefly fan so this is disappointing. Hopefully we can separate the artist from the art in this case. Buffy and the female characters in Firefly could more than hold their own, as I recall.
  • What Was the TED Talk? Was? Are they a thing of the past? There were some good ones, but overall I didn’t have the patience for them and thought the point of most of them could be summarized in a paragraph or two.
  • I Lived the #VanLife. It Wasn’t Pretty. The author lived “the van life” for “a few days” and apparently wasn’t a fan.
  • In the Court of the Liver King. I already covered this one recently, but worth mentioning again because…oh my…
  • It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is? Cats vs. birds. This article sounds like it is 100% on the side of the birds, but I have seen some debate on this in the scientific literature, with strong feelings on both sides.
  • The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life. It might talk and act exactly like a sentient organism, they say, but it doesn’t actually know what it is doing. Well, none of us can truly ever know the mind of another apparently sentient organism, so if it behaves exactly the way a sentient organism would behave, it is a sentient organism for all practical purposes. We might decide at some point in the future that it is obvious AI has become sentient, and then try to trace backward to determine exactly when it happened. Could 2022 be that year? Maybe, probably not? But maybe it is not far away? This seems like an important story.
  • The Weird, Analog Delight of Foley Sound Effects. Godzilla’s original roar was something like a cello in extreme slow motion, as I recall.
  • The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time. Yes, Sherlock Holmes was the first that came to my mind, and he makes the list even though as we all know he didn’t die (we all know that right? Hopefully I didn’t just spoil that for you.) The Wicked Witch of the West, of course. I just tweeted that at a colleague the other day who refused to come out of her house on a rainy day, so yes she comes in handy. Bonnie and Clyde? They died in real life, in the same way they died in the movie, right? But when it comes to “best scene of people machine gunned in a car”, I would nominate the toll booth scene from The Godfather, which did not make the list. There are several horror movie screamers on this list, which I am personally not into. And surely Yoda deserves a spot? Ahab? Patrick Swayze’s character in Point Break? I mean, Jesus! No seriously, what about Jesus?
  • I Do Not Keep a Diary. Neither do I. Well, I did for awhile, but I called it a journal because diaries are for girls. Finally, I got over myself and started a blog, because exploring my inner thoughts about the outside world is more interesting than recounting the mostly uninteresting things that happen to me in daily life (I had Rice Krispies and an orange for breakfast this morning – are you bored yet?). And for the occasional interesting things that do happen to and around me, I can work them in.

fairy tales

The Spectator has a review of a new book on the origin of fairy tales. I tended to think “fairies” were Celtic in origin, but this article talks about Middle East, French, and Nordic origins among others. And some were just invented by Hans Christian Andersen, who apparently stayed in Charles Dickens’s house at some point and severely outstayed his welcome.

NYT best books of 2021

And continuing the “best books” theme, this year’s New York Times list is out. The only one that really catches my eye is When we Cease to Understand the World. This appears to be historical fiction somehow knitting together the 20th century’s great scientists and their ideas.

Other books mostly cover a variety of racial and multicultural topics that are interesting and good to know about, but I do not have time to learn about them in book form. There’s a new autobiography of Sylvia Plath, and I like and am saddened by Sylvia Plath, but I think I would rather spend time reading her original work rather than an autobiography about her. Just a random note since I was briefly talking about Margaret Attwood yesterday – when I think of The Handmaid’s Tale I often think of Sylvia Plath, and also Anne Frank, and also Frederick Douglas and other first-person slave narratives. All depressing, and all things everyone should read. The Handmaid’s Tale is at least a work of fiction although it seems quite real when you are in the middle of it, at least for me, and especially the audiobook version.

Planetizen top 10 books of 2021

Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
  • Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.

On revolution

Today’s topic is random thoughts on revolution. Seems fitting somehow as I write on Thanksgiving Eve 2021. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American (i.e. U.S.) holiday, although it has nothing to do with the American Revolution per se.

First, for Thanksgiving I have purchased a 12-pack of the Yard’s breweries “beers of the revolution”. Yards claims to have based these recipes on ones found in the actual papers of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. However literally or loosely they have interpreted whatever is in those papers, these beers are all yummy! I plan to drink “George Washington’s Porter” on Thanksgiving itself.

Second, I have purchased the novel Invisible Sun by Charles Stross, which is next in the Merchant Princes series and came out just recently. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the idea of revolution plays a role in this series. In fact, there is a book that serves as a sort of cheat sheet for how to avoid the mistakes of revolutions past and successfully mix politically revolution with catch-up technological progress. They seem to manage just this, although they do not avoid the ravages of global warming. A slight spoiler is that the American Revolution is not the primary model for their revolution, and neither is the British Revolution, the French Revolution, or any other European revolution a mostly ignorant American might have heard of. Nor is it based on communism, although they do seem to have decent public transportation, which we here in the U.S. know is a Commie plot!

Partly inspired by Charles Stross, I read a book called The Shortest History of Europe and another called Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West: 1560-1991. I learned that there was something called a Dutch revolution, which I had no idea of. My knowledge of the British and French revolutions was mostly based on being forced to read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, which is mostly about the French revolution. The other fictional account I thought was about the French Revolution was Les Miserables, which I looked up and it is not about the (1789) French Revolution, but takes place around the 1830s. Like I said, I’m ignorant. But it’s not really my fault – in the course of my grade school studies, I had no less than three full years of American history, plus a full year of Virginia history around fourth or fifth grade. Wouldn’t it make sense if we had at least a year of European history at some point, maybe around the same time we are forced to read A Tale of Two Cities? The history of classical Greece and Rome, followed by Europe, used to be called “western civilization”. That might not be politically correct these days – well, maybe a two-year course covering those topics in a larger context of world history would make equal sense.

Continuing my historical theme this fall, I also read (listed to) S.P.Q.R. by Mary Beard, a historian of ancient Rome. I enjoyed this much more than the European history. It all ties together in a few ways. First, the fall of the Roman Republic in the first century B.C. (we are supposed to say B.C.E. now), along with the instability in many European countries around the 1700s right through the 1900s, convinces me that long-term stable governments are definitely the exception and not the rule in human affairs. Stable forms of government, democratic or not, seem to often be measured in years to decades. Centuries definitely seem to be the except to the rule, and I am not aware of any form of government that persisted for a millennium or more. So you could say the U.S. is doing pretty well as it approaches to 250-year mark, but getting pretty long in the tooth. Changes in government are not always sudden or violent. The Roman emperors maintained many of the nominal institutions of the Republic on paper, such as the Senate, while gradually usurping their functions. In the end, the Roman empire did “fall” so much as fade away into regional enclaves mixed in with the quasi-international Catholic and Orthodox churches. The breakup of the British, French, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires mirror this in many ways, and there may be some parallels to U.S. retrenchment in parts of the world, although that history is far from settled. There are probably good examples in the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres too, but I will have to chip away on my ignorance of those another time!

One final thought – something that surprised me is that episodes of inflation are a common theme that often coincide with or trigger political instability in history. Maybe I will give this some more thought and attempt to say intelligent things about it another time.

Summer Reading 2021, and Donald Rumsfeld’s parallel universe

Warning, I will mostly try to limit spoilers to things you could learn from reading the book descriptions below on Amazon, but if you are really interested in experiencing the Merchant Princes series, the Dark Tower series, or Star Trek Discovery with no prior inkling of what they are about, maybe avoid this post.

I haven’t made a summer reading post yet in 2021. And Donald Rumsfeld passed away this week. How are these two things related? Well, it seems that my summer reading theme for this year has settled on parallel universes. This happened somewhat by accident. A year or more ago, I ran out of books in Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series and turned to his Merchant Princes series without really knowing what it was about. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, so let’s just say it involves parallel universes along with stealth lessons on economics and the history of technological progress. It’s also about a Game of Thrones-esque medieval succession crisis, nuclear terrorism, and how the United States government might (over)react to an incident of nuclear terrorism. Which is where Donald Rumsfeld comes in. And I’ll leave it at that, having already said too much. I never get quite into the characters or plots in this series as much as I did the Laundry Files, but I’m still enjoying.

In my mind, the real Rumsfeld in our universe gets a lot of credit for the Iraq weapons of mass destruction lie, the Iraq invasion, and Guantanamo Bay, and more generally civilian deaths and mistreatment of prisoners of war. And almost all of it was by choice rather than necessity. What I didn’t remember, but was reminded of by this Intercept article, was his central role in the “Plan B” assessment in the 70s that produced alternative facts (aka lies) about Soviet nuclear capability and led to the huge arms buildup of the 1980s. So in my book he had a lot of blood on his hands, and took foolish risks that could have led to unimaginable consequences. I find it hard to mourn his passing.

Anyway back to happier topics in bloodless fictional universes like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Ha ha, did I say bloodless? This is Stephen King we’re talking about. I read The Stand during the 2020 Covid-19 shut down, then moved on to this for this summer. In a forward to The Stand, Stephen King talks about how he originally intended The Stand to be a sort of Lord of the Rings set in the American west. The Stand turned out to be something different, and this turns out to be more like what The Stand was meant to be early on. There’s a tower and an eye, for chrissakes. It’s pretty awesome – a wild mashup of Lord of the Rings, Clint Eastwood movies (I’m listening to the audiobook and the narrator uses a spot-on Clint Eastwood impression throughout), King Arthur, Roger Zelasny’s Amber series (which is also evident in the Merchant Princes series, but I would say more evident here), Brothers Grimm (and/or its Disney variants), the Wizard of Oz, King’s own work, and I am sure thousands of other things I am not picking up on. Like at one point, we meet a crouching tiger and a hidden dragon just a few pages apart. It might not hold together if it was written by someone other than Stephen King, but hey…

Did I mention Star Trek Discovery above? I like Star Trek – it’s a little nerdy, a little campy, the acting is not always excellent, and it’s just relaxing and fun and you don’t have to think too hard. Well, this turned out to be less campy, better acted, and more fun than I expected. There’s some martial arts action from Michelle Yeoh, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, and is now 58 years old. And there is a parallel universe angle, which I wasn’t expecting, and just slotted it right into place with my summer theme.

I’m going to run out of Merchant Princes most likely, so I might read another Amber novel. I don’t love Amber actually, but it’s just canonical so I plan to work my way through it little by little. After Labor Day, I’ll return to my usual alternating of fiction and non-fiction, and generally slower reading pace.

novel writing software, Scrivener, and R Bookdown

This is a pretty niche post, but a couple years ago I briefly entertained a fantasy of becoming a novelist. After I tried to write a novel, my the wisdom of not quitting my day job was affirmed. But in the course of that, I briefly investigated software that novelists are using to organize their books and research. The most popular is called Scrivener. I was thinking though that it would be neat if someone would customize the R packages Markdown or Bookdown for writing, because then especially if you are writing non-fiction you could have all your data, analysis code, tables, figures, references etc. in one place along with your prose. This post describes a system that allows the author to actually combine the use of Scrivener and R Bookdown.

the Overlook Hotel

Ever wonder if the Overlook Hotel from The Shining is real, and where it is? It is real, it’s in Oregon, and you can stay there. Its real name is The Timberline. The interior is not like the movie though, those shots were done in a movie studio. That’s probably good, unless you are looking for a creepy Halloween experience. There is no hedge maze, but the mountain setting and snow are real. It is most certainly not shut down for the winter, because it is a ski resort.

Solaris

I’ve been revisiting the fantastic descriptions of the alien ocean in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and I just want to share one part of one paragraph, which I hope does not constitute a copyright violation. His paragraphs are quite long however.

…if comparisons with Earth really have to be employed – these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescances”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over a monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent format, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystallizing jelly…

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

Like I said, that is one part of one paragraph. It goes on like that for a long time. There have been a couple movies, but it really is a case where a few words are worth a thousand pictures, and whatever you picture in your mind is better than anything the most talented movie special effects person could come up with.