Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

 Puppy: off
 Phrase of the day: "abundant year"

A quote from the column “Welcome Back, Duke: From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues”:

Once about 10 years ago there was a story–you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer–about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That’s what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark. (Peggy Noonan, October 12, 2001)

I read, I write. I think I’m over the hump in Blue Mars, so if I’m feeling especially industrious this weekend I may have a review (informal, broggy and plausibly deniable) up by Monday. I’m trying to finish the neverending Mars trilogy before I read Memory, an LMB book that recently reappeared at the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library. I won’t hoard it for as long as the previous borrower. I hear that LMB just finished her next book, Diplomatic Immunity, but it won’t be out until May, and then only in hardcover–well beyond the budget of starving artists, more’s the pity.

If you’re asking who LMB is…what can I say? You haven’t lived? You haven’t read? I myself lived in ignorance of the execellence that is Lois McMaster Bujold until a few short months ago. I started with A Civil Campaign, which was not a good place to start but was the only LMB book in the local Brighton branch of the Boston Public Library. That’s just another sign of the wretched ignorance of LMB that pervades this, her native land.

Most of her books are about Miles Vorkosigan, a man who would try to deck the shark (not to mention succeed) and his family. My favorite LMB book is Komarr, although it seems to have received the least recognition. My favorite line: “It doesn’t hurt.” When I said Startide Rising was a perfect book and just mentioned Shards of Honor, that was only because I’ve come to assume perfection from LMB, and assume the worst about most other sf writers, even if they’ve gotten Nebulas for their efforts. You can find out all about LMB at The Bujold Nexus.

Yesterday during the freeshell slump I added the Brog to blogdex, but I haven’t had the time to check my logs for foreign activity. Though freeshell keeps GMT time, here in Boston it’s dinnertime, so I’m off…

 Puppy: off

I’m not dictating today because I don’t feel like freeing up the memory to run ViaVoice, the Incredible Resource Hog. See if you can tell the difference, Christine.

I’ve just added a few more links to the [former brog home page], as well as linking yours brogly at eatonweb portal - […] and I didn’t even have to embezzle a blogger account. Little did I know that blogging was a movement. I feel so trendy…

I finished Startide Rising today, a little late because I picked up my sister’s copy of Beggars Ride while I was down the street feeding Nice Cat and Mean Iguana. Beggars Ride was one of those books where you get closer and closer to the back cover and you realize that there’s just not enough room left for a decent ending, despite Nancy Kress’ willingness to nuke every character that could have posed a plot complication. Also, the final gametes seemed to undermine the theme of unmodified human resillience. Nevertheless, it saved me from the dreaded Blue Mars for one more day, so it wasn’t all bad.

Startide Rising was a perfect book. I enjoyed David Brin’s The Postman a few weeks ago, but it was more a collection of novellas than a novel. Startide Rising had no such obvious flaws, although the hijinks at the end seemed to be telegraphed for quite a large portion of the book. The copyright page mentions an earlier version in Analog, but I wouldn’t have otherwise pegged it as a novella stretched on the rack to form a novel (cf. Ender’s Game).

Well, I’m supposed to be making some edits on someone else’s book, which means The Wrong Novel is on hold yet again. In fact, the entire Wrong Trilogy is on hold until the economy collapses enough that I’m completely unemployed. Sigh…

  Puppy: on

Due to technical difficulties here at freeshell I have been unable to blog for the last few days. Now I have a patch for the difficulty and I’m back in blogness. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It’s not going well. I had my doubts about Red Mars and the other Marses only compound its flaws. I have to wonder what people saw in these books to give them so many awards.

I couldn’t bring myself to take Blue Mars to Nantucket with with me over the weekend, so I read Shards of Honor by LMB instead. After running around in circles on the martian landscape, a book with a plot was a great improvement. Maybe the fundamental flaw of Robinson’s books is the absence of weddings. That’s one martian literary tradition Kim Stanley Robinson failed to include in his trilogy; Edgar Rice Burroughs wouldn’t dare to publish a Mars book where no fair maidens were rescued and married. In Shards of Honor the fair maiden rescues the man, but that’s a minor detail. Sergyar isn’t Mars.

The book I’m currently reading instead of Blue Mars is Startide Rising by David Brin. I read the first Uplift novel a while back and was a little disappointed; it was a good mystery but not the epic I was expecting. Startide Rising is looking little more epic, fortunately, and it even has a plot. Just no areography, please!

Found it!

http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb/

Unfortunately, it seems to be more of a bibliography than a database. I was hoping for something along the lines of The Encyclopedia of Arda (http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/default.htm). The wiki is here if anyone wants to help me dream big.

In case you’re curious, I’m using IBM ViaVoice [on MacOS 8.6] to dictate my brog. I had to teach it to recognize brog and blog, but now it even knows nonsense words. It’s a terrible processor hog, and I don’t think it knows me too well yet, but it’s still cool. Whenever I use it I think of the dog and the gramophone and that old RCA ad. The point, however, was to help me write, not to help me blog - I mean brog - so I suppose I should get back to writing.