Fragile Things, Gaiman. Yes. Not all of the stories collected here are gems, but most of them are very good, and only one or two write checks that the effort Gaiman put into them does not cover.
Author Archives: Craig
The Book Thief Review
The Book Thief, Zusak. No. I didn’t hate I Am the Messenger, but I hated this. I gave up after the first chapter or so, and the chapters were very brief. It made me long for Mandy Patinkin. I think the lesson here may be that if you have a stunt premise, you need to go easy on the stunt writing style. Of course, easy on the stunt writing style is almost always the way to go, irrespective of your premise.
The Historian Review
The Historian, Kostova. Yes. I found very little to dislike about this book. I hear that lots of folks disliked it, and my librarian speculates that there may have been a reflexive "I don’t like genre fiction" effect. It’s enough to make me sympathize with Harlan Ellison’s quest to get his works out of the SF ghetto. Whatever aspects others may have disliked, my complaints are minor: there are multiple narrative time lines, some presented in epistolary form, and others related differently, but there is so comparatively little action on what one might think of as the main narrative line that I couldn’t help wondering whether some other structure might have been less jarring (and, yes, there are fine reasons for going with the epistolary tradition, and I surely can’t advocate the book being any longer, so maybe it was the best way to go). I was also distracted by "a historian" vs "an historian". I’m quite sure Kostova was consistent as to which characters said which, but I think she may have just made the Americans say "a" and the non-Americans "an". Given how long ago some of the action takes place, I would have expected even the Americans of the time to use "an". There’s also at least one section where Kostova renders dialect via non-standard spellings of words, and that pulled my head right out of the book every time. Complaints notwithstanding, I think Kostova did an admirable job with the material.
A new low in shamelessness
I am linking to this story about 3d video clips of the sun solely so I can say "Coronal mass ejections? Sounds like spring break at Cabo!"
The nine-o’clock show is completely different from the six-o’clock. Try the veal. Tip your waitresses.
Got a decade? Become world class—at anything
Despite its understandable focus on business, I found this article on how becoming great at anything takes a lot of practice extremely interesting. I was especially struck by the notion of "deliberate practice", and how it’s the only practice that matters when seeking improvement.
Who asked for it?
Yet still more research into how to do something that will almost certainly be misused. I do wonder whether Flexitral‘s theory would allow them to reduce the "hundreds" of chemicals the olfactograph requires.
Update: poking around Flexitral’s pages led me to this bit of marketing to a narrow audience: "the first carnation aromachemical incorporating a thioether moiety." Finally!
Flights Review
Flights, ed. Sarrantonio. No. It’s perhaps not entirely fair to dismiss the entire collection, but the first half convinced me that I would be better off skipping the second half. I had a bad feeling about the collection from the word "Extreme" in the subtitle, and this feeling was reinforced by the presence of a story written by the editor (I didn’t make it to Sarrantonio’s story, but his introductions did not inspire me to persevere). The "Extreme Visions" in the subtitle invites comparison with Dangerous Visions, a nearly 40-year-old collection. Flights is not worthy of the invitation.
The Demolished Man Review
The Demolished Man, Bester. Yes (classic). I was disappointed with some aspects of the work as a whole, but the writing was just fine. I do enjoy reading The Future As Imagined in the Fifties, and this was as charming in its presentation as any.
Can it be traditional if the patent is still good?
Aside from the inherent cool (uninspiring though I find it) of this tiny projector, I’m entertained by the line "Traditional projectors use arrays of millions of mirrors to display footage." I have a hard time thinking of anything that was in prototype within the last decade or so as "traditional."
U.S.! Review
U.S.!, Bachelder. Yes. It’s possible I’m not bright or attentive enough to have caught everything Mr Bachelder was doing in this meta-polemic, but there was enough on the surface to entertain me and keep me reading, and anything additional he was doing did not distract me.