The Early Days of a Better Nation

Tuesday, May 19, 2009



On a lighter note ...

... and belatedly, here's a link to this year's Locus April 1 story, in which I get a passing mention. Fame at last! Sending it to me, Lawrence Person wrote: 'P.S. I would totally read those novels.' To which I replied that I'd totally write the second one.

Don't miss the other spoof stories in the Locus sidebar.

Labels: , ,


12 Comments:

You know, you SHOULD totally write the second one...

How about, the story of feudal aristocratic mercenaries in the employ of a distant system's anarcho-communist Matrioshka hive-mind. Sort of fits with dialectical materialism... anyway you'd have to be quick or Charlie Stross will get in first. ;)

Now that's good ... but wasn't it Iain M. Banks who got there first? (Almost - Use of Weapons.)

The "King's Red Brigades" is gettig added to my Amazon wish list!

[chuckle] that's right, loved that one... didn't I read somewhere that you were to 'blame' for him finally publishing it. Good job!

"The Token Ring is an hilarious satire on modern management, packed with in-jokes about cluster computing and online gaming, set on a three-thousand-light-year-wide ring of exotic matter, built by a dying race of sun-dwelling aliens in an attempt to stave off the universe-ending false vacuum collapse triggered by a renegade NASA astronaut and his estranged wife. Stross and Baxter have excelled themselves."

"Ben Elton and Robert E. Howard's first collaborative novel is an uneasy combination of right-on political diatribe and old-school fantasy worldbuilding, but it has enough nuggets of genius to lift it, from time to time, above the suspicion of being merely sub-Pratchett satire. Perdido Street Station will be out in paperback in May."

"The King's Red Brigades" sounds awsome, can't wait for the paperback.

I believe the "Girl Detective's Quantum Hat" is going to be made into a film by Terry Gilliam.

Regardless of whether I ever have the pleasure of reading either The King's Red Brigades or The Girl Detective's Quantum Hat, I just finished (an imported copy of) The Night Sessions. GREAT BOOK! Could hardly put it down.

I especially liked the quote about the susceptibility of engineers to intelligent design theories. My undergrad studies were at a Free Methodist college that was full of engineering students and they ate it up like candy (as did their professors)!

Thnaks for the kind words, ilorien.

Part of the engineers/ID/fundamentalist connection may be that engineering is a safe field for bright young fundamentalists to get into.

Yes, I think you're absolutely right on that. I often wonder whether I might still be among the "faithful" if I'd gone into engineering rather than public health and medicine. I'm sure that if my parents had made the engineering/ID/fundamentalist connection, I would have received strong encouragement for the engineering path.

It's also a safe field for a fundamentalist to get into, in that it's seen as useful to the regime rather than politically worrying... when the secret police start rounding up potential troublemakers at the university, they'll go for the law students and the politics students and the trainee mullahs, but might well leave the engineers alone. Everyone needs engineers.

Post a Comment


Home