Life On Mars Season Two was absolutely fucking amazing! It is not very often that I come across a series that brings such an emotional response from me, the list is short at least. This show was amazing overall, and the ending of season two was nothing short of brilliant.
The most amazing thing is that the US remake managed to completely screw this up beyond all belief. They did something so typically American I am embarrassed to mention it. The made Sam Tyler... a Martian. I suppose it was due to the fact that the series is called Life on Mars, but still it made the US remake a farce. No wonder it only lasted one season.
Thankfully the British original is still here. People who have never heard of Life on Mars, or who might have watched ABC's horrifying remake, really need to find this show and devour it. It is what every TV show should be, funny, exciting, creepy, horrifying, and unabashedly good.
The one down side to American audiences will be the thick Manchester accent. After a an episode or so, even my wife was able to understand most of the hilarious stuff coming from DCI Gene Hunt's mouth. By the end of the second season there was still a few times where we would rewind to try and grab what in the hell was said.
The ending here was spectacular. I really don't want to spoil anything, and believe me I am really fighting the urge to do so, so for fuck's sake go find this show and watch it!
So I read this little gem of a story by Cory Doctorow this morning and I really liked it. And while I don’t explicitly believe in his “experiment” or his views on copyright, you cannot doubt that his short stories are great.
This story follows Felix and Van two system administrators who are trying to keep the major Canadian backbone of the Net online after a series of catastrophes have brought about a worldwide apocalypse. It’s a good story, and to prove it (only if awards are your thing I suppose) it won the 2007 Locus award for best novelette.
On a completely different note I need to figure out if and how short stories will add into my overall total for the 45 books in 2010. I’m thinking 2-1 if they are novellas, or 3 or 4-1 for novelettes. Hell I might not even care.
So Sunday morning I finally finished Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky, a science fiction novel centered around the event and aftermath of a “type 3 singularity,” a technological singularity, occurring on a distant planet under a feudal government. The premise is that a backwater feudal government and pre-industrial society under heavy censorship and an informational chokehold is thrust into an open information galactic network hub, essentially becoming the equivalent of a giant PBX switch in space. The flood of information to and from the purported attackers, known as The Festival, exchanges local information for basically anything the person wants.
This book took me a long time to get through, from no fault of its own, and honestly the first half is somewhat slow. But the second half is excellent. and while this is not my favorite book as a whole, that still belongs to the excellent Culture series, this is still a brilliant piece on a subject with which Mr. Stross is always good at, a singularity. The premise is very interesting but the story doesn’t really grab you and hold you until the later half when things turn more exciting. All in all it is a good sci-fi novel and worth reading, and it’s evident sequel Iron Sunrise will definitely be on the list of to- read items very soon.
So next on my to-read list is the humorous Pride Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. So far I’m about a third of the way through its campy humor and zombie vanquishing Victorian ladies.
On a personal note my wife is ready to pop with my second child, her third, and therefore posting, and reading have been slow. I will post pics as soon as it happens.
So I just finished First Lord’s Fury, the sixth and final book in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. This book held a lot of meaning for me and others that are fans of Mr. Butcher’s other excellent series, The Dresden Files. The reason is this, Butcher has never wrote an ending until now. Sure he has written about seventeen books total, some very successful, but he has never ended a series. So this book held the expectations of all of his fans, and might I add that he delivered in spades.
Without spoiling too much, the entire book is a war against the Vord as introduced in the first novel and expanded upon in later ones. Character progression is great, the plot has enough twists and turns to keep you interested. To put it bluntly, it was an awesome read and a worthy finale to an excellent series.
Also finished last night was Use of Weapons by the man quickly becoming my favorite sci-fi author, Scotsman Iain M. Banks. This is another of The Culture series and follows a mercenary named Chernadine Zakalwe in a double story, one set in the past, one current. The theory here is that since The Culture is basically against violence, they find highly capable military professionals to work on their behalf. Zakalwe is one of these recruits, a veritable genius of military action used on countless worlds by The Culture. The story follows his exploits, but is truly about his hidden demons.
This is another shining example of Mr. Bank’s shear superiority of, not just the space opera, but of just damn good story-telling to boot. This is another must read for sci-fi fans out there.
So, next on the reading list is Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. This is a book that I have been meaning to read for a year now, and well no time like the present I suppose.
rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was an interesting twist on the common urban fantasy story. I will be looking forward to further books in this series! I really liked the Norse connection here, being a big fan of Norse mythology and Rune lore in general this was a very enjoyable romp through a modern re-visioning of of Norse gods and monsters.
View all my reviews.
This was made using the GoodReads Review widget that will export to HMTL. I like it since it has the image link and everything in it already.
If you missed collecting “Farscape” on DVD during its initial release, we have good news for you. The long out-of-print series is coming back to DVD this November.
The set will be launched at a panel at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con and is being picked up by A&E Home Video. The set will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the show.
When a freak accident during an experimental space mission catapulted Astronaut John Crichton (Ben Browder) across a thousand galaxies to an alien battlefield, a cult classic was born with the epic, adventure-filled TV series Farscape. The award-winning fan favorite show, which ran from 1999-2003 on Sci Fi and was named by TV Guide as one of television’s best cult shows ever, is about to blast off again on DVD courtesy of a pact between A&E Home Entertainment and The Jim Henson Company.
Blasting off in November 2009, as the show marks its 10th Anniversary, the treasure of the newly re-packaged DVD line will feature a Farscape home entertainment first: THE COMPLETE SERIES MEGASET. Never before available in one package, A&E Home Entertainment brings together all four out-of-this-world seasons with countless hours of absorbing bonus programming featuring multiple commentaries, interviews with cast and crew, behind-the-scenes featurettes and much more! Single season collector’s sets will also be released, offering genre fans of all walks the opportunity to sample this superlative sci-fi classic.
To launch this eagerly-anticipated re-release, there will be a Farscape panel convening at this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego. Executive producer Brian Henson, creator Rockne O’Bannon, and stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black (Officer Aeryn Sun) will be in attendance to discuss their favorite moments from the series and the DVD re-release.
Every time you read a book in a genre you love you always end up, subconsciously or consciously, comparing it to your mind’s own vision of that genre. Usually this is another book you have read in the past that is for you the closest to what your mind’s eye sees of that genre.
In my case for the last several months every time I read science fiction of any type, from Cherryh to Stross, I find myself comparing it to one novel in particular. The funny thing is that when I read it I thought it a great book, but would not have put it at the top of my sci-fi pile. But as time goes on I realize that so far Consider Phlebas is my quintessential sci-fi.
This actually came as a surprise to me, although now I am not sure why, but really it does make perfect sense. It has everything that a great space opera should have: action, intrigue, aliens, sex with strange furry proto-human females, and a super advanced society capable of giving its inhabitants anything they desire. Seriously, what’s not to love?
So now I am reading the second novel in the Culture series, The Player of Games, and while it is told from the viewpoint within Culture whereas Consider Phlebas was told from without, it is still shaping up to be an excellent read. Part of the reason for that I think is because of Mr. Bank’s voice throughout both novels so far. There is no struggle to read it and in fact it flows from one line to the next, from one page to the next.
I honestly have not been so keen to finish a series since I first found Jim Butcher’s amazing Dresden Files or Charles Stross’s Laundry series. Iain M. Banks’ Culture is the reading list through the summer.
Every once in a while you come across a book that forces you to think in ways that you don’t normally. Well every book lets us see through the eyes of a different pair of eyes, allowing us access to a worldview that we might not know of. This is what makes reading so fun, we love to live vicariously through the lives of the characters we read about. To love with them, cry with them, and at times die with them give us each a little bit of insight into a different set of possibilities.
When we read science fiction, we typically take those known world views and ignore them, giving us a glimpse of an alien culture (whether it is actually alien or simply so high tech that it seems foreign) that we can live in for a time. Sometimes, however, a book comes around that seems so familiar that it could be your worldview, and yet at the same time is quite alien. Those books typically give us more insight about us as a culture and a race than many others.
Anathem is one of those books.
The story is centered around a society in which most of the highly intelligent have been placed into monastic-like Maths, where the inhabitants, called the Avout, are sequestered off from normal everyday living as we know it. To summarize 900 pages is not simple so let this suffice:
Anathem is a novel of speculative fiction set on a world where scholars live apart from the rest of society at a time when great events are breaking down traditional barriers. The novel involves numerous ideas in physics, cosmology and philosophy as well as social commentary, mixed in with science fiction concepts and an adventure as the main characters cope with their own world and try to understand a great secret that will change everything.
This book is good. Not good like the Dresden Files’ entertaining romp through urban fantasy. No it’s good like reading Descartes, Archimedes, Einstein, Plato, Socrates, Gödel, Husserl, Thales, and many others and understanding them all. Mr. Stephenson, he gins the Mister from here on out as a prominent term of respect, has done what many have failed to do for some of us during college, give us a rudimentary understanding of Philosophy, Physics, and Quantum Mechanics.
This book is pivotal for me personally as it brought back to mind many of the old thought experiments I would play with friends in school and in college with my Philosophy professors. It also reminded me that, even though I am stuck here physically away from friends that I mss dearly because of the lack of those conversations mentioned earlier, I can still hold such discussions in mind just as an Avout from some far off Math might have on Arbre.
This book has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and we be re-read numerous times. It is a wonderful read, if a bit slow at first. And it is nothing like Stephenson’s other work. Well I could see some ties to Cryptonomicon but only in his breadth of knowledge and attempts at relaying that across to the reader, something he does far better in Anathem.
This was my fisrt Inspector Morse novel to read, the only one I've been able to find State-side, and I absolutely loved it. This is book 12 of 13 so some of the sub-plots I was not privy to. But It was an amazingly well written and planned ...
