This is a nice little story, picking up from the original Frankenstein story.
Thoughtfully made, and with a nice twist. The diary form works ok, though the title gives away a part of the plot.
6/10
Schoen was a complete unknown to me, so I do not know if this is his usual style.
As stories go this one does not, to me, have a real plot. The closest to a story line is the search for archeological evidence.
The story feels like a series of disjointed images with an extremely loose connection. there is the search (see above), then an image of a generation ship (crash) landing on a moon, and finally a connection to a great machine, apparently near the center of the galaxy.
I found the conclusion a bit anticlimactic, oh, yes, this seems to be about a species (probably humanity) leaving a planet (probably Earth).
While I do not particularly like the story, I respect the author going where few have gone before, even if this did not work out for me. It must have worked for other people, since it was nominated for the Award.
3/10 from me.
Having watched the first episode of the “new Who” Silurian story, “The Hungry Earth” I decided to take a look at the very first Silurian story, I happened to have it on DVD in the “Beneath the Surface” box set.
Now, when overcoming the rather poor technical quality (thank you very much BBC for deleting the tapes) and thus the poor video quality, this is a very good story.
The memory of my early Doctor Who (before the “new series” is mainly of Jon Pertwee, and I do recall to have seen some nice stories.
Early Who mostly has a lot of running through corridors etc (well, new Who does, too), chased by monsters. While looking monster-like, the Silurians are not really that much different in attitudes from humans, making them more interesting adversaries.
This is more so true of the escalating military part of the conflict, so well commented by the Doctor.
The end is rather sad, and perhaps that is reflected in “The Hungry Earth”, seeing the Doctor’s attitude towards the Silurians.
All short stories, novellettes, novellas and novels have been transferred to the e-reader, so reading can be done from anywhere.
I will have to check if some of the other material is transferable, but other activities have been there for the long week end.
Finally I decided to become a “supporting member” of Worldcon2010 (Aussiecon).
This means that I have been downloading the “Hugo Voter Package” with the majority of the material nominated for the Hugo Awards. When unpacked this amounts to a whopping 700MB, including 5-6 each of Novels, Novellettes, Novellas and Short Stories, as well as a fair bit of Fan and pro magazines, fan and pro artworks.
Last year I started out with reading the novels ( the short stories had already been listened to as podcasts ) and I think that was somewhat of a mistake, since I never got to anything shorter than the novels (apart from the short stories) before the time to vote had come.
This year the plan is to go the opposite way, so I started looking at the:
Fan Artist category in the package :
Brad W. Foster,
David Howell,
Steve Stiles and
Taral Wayne
All were nominated for graphics art in different styles, except David Howell who designed the base for the 2009 Hugo award.
David Howell will be my choice of Fan Artist for the Hugo Awards 2010. I like the design a lot and I think he deserves to be recognized for the work he did.
Will I be disappointed if someone else wins ? Not at all, this just reflects my preference.
Today I went to a small scifi convention in Copenhagen.
The DanCon is a one day convention with a single thread, all going on i one room. It is organised by one of the Danish Science fiction societies, Science Fiction Cirklen. Everything was going on in Danish.
The con opened with a very nice panel discussion on “Tendencies English language short stories”, with a few examples of authors old and new.
After lunch we had a very nice presentation on medical science of the future, seen in the light of Star Trek technology, quite entertaining with a few examples illustrating how far we have already come and where we are behind the ST tech. An interesting fact is that the “hypospray” of ST had already been invented and tested some years before the original series aired.
The rest of the afternoon we had a presentation of the older British comic strip “Dan Dare”, a presentation of Anime
The afternoon ended with a presentation of the classic scifi magazine Astounding (before Campbell), an interesting insight into the scifi of the 30’s.
I found that I might have a subject for a presentation on a following con, so I am afraid I may have some work to do until then.
All in all a very enjoyable day meeting scifi friends in Denmark.
What is this mania with Login ID’s ?!?
Just went to read a blog entry and wanted to make a comment. Duefully writing the comment , filling in name and email, and the captcha and :
“Could not publish the comment, please enter the captcha code”
WHAT !!!?!?!?!
I just did that ….
Tried once more, could have been typo , or some of those captchas are simply not readable, but no luck.
Then it struck me : You have to “join” just to make a comment !!!
How many login ID’s do we have nowadays ? more than enough to make it absolutely impossible to remember unique ID’s and Passwords – in other words , too many.
I will name this the YALID Syndrome (Yet Another Login ID)
A web story by Joss Whedon.
After having heard most people rave about this little show I finally got the DVD and watched the thing.
The beginning is quite funny, but for me the fun wears off quite quickly. I find it too repetitive and to me that gets boring. I probably have heard too much hype about how hilarious this is.
I have no problem with the production as such, and it probably deserved winning in its Hugo category.
It just did not bring much *to me*.
Sorry about that, guys. Don’t let this take away any of your enjoyment of the show.
6/10 on the Lurker’s scale
From the beginning of the first new season I have always loved the episodes written by Steven Moffat, from ‘The Empty Child’/’The Doctor Dances’ over ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ and the brilliant ‘Blink’ to this double episode. I am looking forward to see what he will bring to the series as show runner.
Like the other stories (when they were written) this story stands a bit by itself in the Doctor Who time line.
We find The Doctor and Donna arriving (in the 51th century) at a planet full of books. In essence it is a library of all known books, known just as The Library. Something is very wrong, since the library seems completely empty. Well, there are the books, but no people at all, just a cryptic computerized warning message ‘Count the Shadows !’ .
Another party arrives, with among others, a certain professor River Song who appears to have a past with The Doctor, in his future. It turns out she even knows the name of The Doctor, something unheard of in the series until now, of course not counting The Doctor posing as John Smith, clearly an alias.
The “monster” of this story is the invisible, but very deadly Vashta Nerada, residing in the shadows and being a kind of “piranhas of darkness”.
In the story we learn enough to know why the Vashta Nerada act like they do, and of course The Doctor, aided by professor Song saves the vast majority of the people trapped on the planet.
The Little girl, living an imaginary life, does raise the questions of “what is reality” when Doctor Moon tells her that the life she thinks of as her own is not real .
For me the story has the best of the elements creating a good Who adventure, a good “monster”, a mystery or two, some good characters accompanying the Doctor, etc.
This was my first choice in the category for the Hugo Awards 2009. ‘Dr Horrible’ won that one, and that is fine.
‘Spoilers !!’ (River Song)
9/10 on the Lurker’s scale
One of my favourite quotes from Babylon 5 comes from the ISN news item where President Clark has declared Martial Law and the Mars colony does not follow suit.
“Mars has rejected Martial Law”
It has always amused me in the midst of all the seriousness of the situation, if you do not know why – think of what is the origin of the term Martial Law.
It refers to the Roman God of War – yes Mars, Martial, so it becomes a sort of a contradictory sentence.