It's certainly a rambling tale, but it rambles it's way past and through many points of interest, so I have few complaints. I was under the impression that the Old London Bridge had been destroyed by the time the novel is set (the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), but it turns out that this is not the case - although the bridge was burned down in 1014, destroyed by a storm in 1091, burned down again in 1136, and the site of catastrophic fires in 1212 and 1633. It was replaced in 1831 by a less combustible stone structure, which was widened in 1904 whereupon it sank into the swamp. Well, it sank slowly, but still...

That sort of history boggles me just a little, as Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge is only seventy years old and has so far not been destroyed even once. To paraphrase someone: In England, a hundred miles is a long distance; in Australia, a hundred years is a long time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:03 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Well - (Oh, and I was reminded that I have a very small washing machine. Had a very small washing machine. Or have a very small ex-washing machine. Some of the models I looked at were huge. Convenient, I suppose, if you have three teenagers and a dog, but not something I need myself.)

Are you finished? (Yes, do go on.)

Right. Got to Galaxy and there's this huge pile near the door of Neal Stephenson's latest work, Confusion. It's the sequel to Quicksilver, which I hadn't bought previously, and both apparently have some connection to Cryptonomicon, which I never managed to get all the way through.

Stephenson is a good writer - I particularly enjoyed Zodiac and Snow Crash - but one of his points, for good or bad, is to wander off into diversions, sometimes for a dozen pages or more. (Speaking of which, most of my comparison shopping was done at Myers - what was Grace Bros., a fine and traditional name, before the mob from Melbourne bought them up. Actually, they've been trading as Grace Bros. for years even after that, but suddenly decided to change the name... A couple of months ago, I think. I sort of missed it, being occupied with other things. After that I went to Bing Lee, who have a new city store where the Sky Garden food court used to be. Wonder what they did with the food court... There used to be a restaurant there that did wonderful barbecue ribs. Anyway, Bing Lee is in theory a discount chain and Myers a mid-range department store, but the prices there were really no better than at Myers, and sometimes worse, and Myers were offering 10% off the marked price of all whitegoods.

What really struck me at Bing Lee, though, was the number of large-screen flat-panel televisions. They're everywhere. And they're not exactly cheap, so either people are buying these things and the economy isn't doing so badly after all or Bing Lee is about to go broke. I have a perfectly good Sony, a 34" model (84 cm to me) about six years old, which I bought just before the changeover to flat screens (flat CRTs, that is, rather than flat panels). It's vertically flat, at least; it's like a cut-away section of a cylinder, which is much easier to do without distorting the picture than a truly flat screen like my monitors. (Also Sony. Which have this horrible tendency to go over-bright over time - my third and final Sony monitor is not long for the world at this rate.)

I have no interest in buying a new TV, since my old one is both large enough and good enough, unless it is both high-definition and reasonably priced. And I have no real interest even then until high-definition material becomes available. And since I never watch broadcast TV these days and can't get cable because the cable companies are run by morons (I'm sure I've ranted about that here before) that means a new high-definition DVD player (which no-one currently makes) and new high-definition DVDs (see above). In the meantime, I have plenty of other ways to burn my money. I could buy a new washing machine, for a start.)

The diversions in Cryptonomicon, though, were rather too much for me. A friend noted how much he enjoyed the book, largely because of the diversions, which he found both entertaining and educational. For me, though, while they were amusing enough, my mind seems to run too closely to the same frequency as Stephenson's and my reaction after the first 400 diversion-packed pages was either get on with the story or I'm ditching the book.

He didn't, so I did. (One thing I did find, and which I have been looking for for some time, is a small, reasonably priced stereo that will play DVD-Rs full of MP3s. I don't know what appeals to you, but since a DVD-R costs me just over a dollar, and even with 256kb/s encoding will hold 40 hours of music, this seems very cool indeed to me. Pop in a disk, hit shuffle play, and that's music sorted out for the duration of the party.)

Now, though, I seem to be in the possession of both Quicksilver and Confusion, 1700 pages of 18th century diversions. (At least, I think it's 18th century. Benjamin Franklin's in it, I think.) And that's 1700 trade paperback pages, so it would probably be over 2000 in mass-market format. Not that there is a MMPB release yet - that I've seen. They're really milking this one.

Also Dan Simmons' Ilium. Dan Simmons is another writer I have mixed feelings about. His Hyperion is a fascinating work, a spin of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in a distant future on an enigmatic planet. The books that followed - The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion, progressively rubbed away at the enigma until nothing much interesting was left. In fact, I never actually read the final volume, having given Endymion a resounding blah on the Pixy Misa BLO scale.*

Well, the Book Shop Guy recommended it very highly, and I have enjoyed some of Simmons' recent non-SF work (specifically Hardcase and Hard Freeze. Darwin's Blade, on the other hand, was clearly written entirely on autopilot. It made me wonder if he has a word processor with functions to insert 500 words on guns here and ramble on about auto engines for 800 words there.), so I bought it too.

And Steven Brust's Sethra Lavode. I don't really have any conflicts about Brust - He's brilliant! Read him! - but this latest work, the third part of his homage to Dumas (The Phoenix Guards being The Three Musketeers, Five Hundred Years After being Twenty Years After among an elf-like race that lives a lot longer than we humans are wont to do, and The Viscount of Adrilankha being of course The Vicomte De Bragelonne. Viscount is itself split into three volumes, namely, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and this, the third. Sethra Lavode, remember?) hasn't grabbed me in the same way, possibly because it is divided into three parts like Gaul, and is filled with garlicky snails.

Or possibly just because the parts of what should be a single novel are appearing a year apart, just long enough for the previous volume to fade in the mind but not quite long enough for it to be an attractive re-read. I didn't finish The Lord of Castle Black because I really needed to re-read The Paths of the Dead to enjoy it properly, only I didn't. Now I have all three volumes in hand, and can do the work justice - and I just need to find the time.

Finally, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light of the Sun. Guy Kay is one of my (many) favourite fantasy authors. Though admittedly his first work, The Fionavar Tapestry, was something of a mess (belonging to the fling fantasy tropes at the page and see what sticks school of writing), he redeemed himself and more with Tigana. His writing has improved since then, with A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan, and most recently The Sarantine Mosaic, but none of those have resonated with me quite the way Tigana does.

Partly, it's the settings. Tigana has some vague flavour of the warring Italian states of, say, the 15th century, but it's clearly its own world, not just Italy with the names filed off. Arbonne is France, more or less, but again not just a cut-and-paste. Al-Rassan, though, is obviously Moorish Spain, and Sarantium is Byzantium, Constantinople, without any real effort to distinguish or disguise it.

I don't like that very much, even when the writing is good - and in Kay's case, it is.

More than that, though, there's the theme of Tigana: A country, defeated in war, and punished for its resistence by having its name taken away, wiped from the memories of its people by magic. And of the struggle of those few who remember to reclaim the memory of their land for their people. This struck me as a terribly, terribly painful thing - to be unable to recall the name of your own land, the land that you grew up in and loved. If you enjoy fantasy and haven't yet read Tigana, do. Even if you've read Fionavar and have since sworn off Kay's work - which would be akin to reading The Number of the Beast and swearing off Heinlein, as one of my friends did for years.

So, and so; 1700 pages of Stephenson, 600 of Simmons, 350 pages of Brust, who is normally commendably succinct, unless I should decide to re-read the whole of Viscount in which case the number is closer to 1100, and 500 pages of Kay.

If you don't hear much from me in the next few days, well, I'll be in the laundry.

* Book-Like Object. A term used to describe things printed on paper and bound between covers that cannot justly be described as books.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:52 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

That's what colour my TV is when it's tuned to a dead channel.

I was just watching the start of Chrno Crusade, and the opening credits are old, degraded film stock, with all the blips and streaks and wiggly things you get with old films. Of course, it wasn't really, since Chrno Crusade was made last year; it's a digitally generated effect.

But I wonder, if all you had ever seen was digitally-projected perfection, what you would make of this?

After all, we are already bringing up a generation to whom Y*(*&)@$^%B)#@$)(^F@#%)(T NO CARRIER means nothing. ADSL and cable modems don't do that, and even on dial-up you're more likely to see a friendly pop-up message saying "Windows has detected some sort of problem somewhere".

You don't get the scrunchy, crackly sound of old vinyl records any more. I have about a dozen LPs stashed away... Somewhere. I don't even own a turntable. I still recognise the sound, of course, and a period song from the thirties or forties or fifties with that sound behind it will serve quickly to set the stage for a film or TV show. But how much longer will producers get away with that?

The sound of a shortwave radio that is just barely bringing in a signal?

The sound of a radio being tuned between stations using an analog dial rather than push-buttons?

The clatter of a manual typewriter, the chatter of a high-speed impact printer?

The whirr of a film camera? The mime routine for filming something - one hand curled in front of the eye, peering through; the other hand cranking the film along at a steady 24 frames per second?

The click! of a camera shutter? Did you realise that in some places digital cameras are legally required to produce a click sound? And since they don't do so naturally, they need a small speaker to digitally reproduce the appropriate sound?

Maybe that's the answer. Maybe televisions should generate artificial static when your digital HDTV set-top box conks out. Maybe all mobile phones should be leigislated to go ring ring rather than bip-bip-biddely. After all, no matter what the ring tone is, everyone reaches for their phone.

Maybe electric cars should be programmed to "backfire" every so often, and generate a nice throaty roar when you stomp on the "gas".

And maybe someone should write a program for Windows so that just when you least expect it you suddenly see Y*(*&)@$^%B)#@$)(^F@#%)(T NO CARRIER

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:25 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Exactly what role did the University of Crime play in the final outcome of events? How essential was it that Plessiez went back and disrupted the plague magia, aside from placating the Night Court? And the model of the Temple of Salomon that Casaubon and his friends built, that was finally made real by the Decan of the Eleventh Hour - did the pattern it embodied really make a difference?

Or did it all come down to Valentine White Crow, scholar-soldier of the Invisible College, saving Theodoret and finally pursuading Spagyrus not to commit suicide?

Heck, I don't know, and I've read the book.

There are two sequels, or at least books containing the same characters... Some of the same characters... Some characters with the same names. Anyway: Left to His Own Devices and The Architect of Desire. I'm reading those now, and I'll see if they shed any light on earlier events.

Probably not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:25 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Hey, where did we go
Days when the rains came?
Down in the hollow
Playing a new game,
Laughing and a-running, hey, hey,
Skipping and a-jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our, our hearts a-thumping
And you, my brown-eyed girl,
You, my brown-eyed girl.

Whatever happened
To Tuesday and so slow
Going down to the old mine with a
Transistor radio.
Standing in the sunlight laughing
Hide behind a rainbow's wall,
Slipping and a-sliding
All along the waterfall
With you, my brown-eyed girl,
You, my brown-eyed girl.

So hard to find my way
Now that I'm all on my own.
I saw you just the other day,
My, how you have grown!
Cast my memory back there, Lord,
Sometime I'm overcome thinking about
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium
With you, my brown-eyed girl,
You, my brown-eyed girl.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:15 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Not that it's out in Australia. It's only available, as far as I know, in Region 1. Of course, that just means that I can walk into the shop and buy it just like a Region 4 DVD, and take it home and play it just like a Region 4 DVD, except that...

Except that nothing. Tell me why they're bothering with this again?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Spending ten hours immersed in Middle Earth would have been an interesting experience, but that's a long time to spend stuck in a cinema (as Susie can tell you).

Unfortunately, I have to work go out to lunch tomorrow, and staying up 'til seven in the morning would likely have interfered with that plan.

A newt?
Well... I got better.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:45 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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No, really.

Wandering around Kinokuniya the other day I discovered that they had in stock both Sergio Aragones' Groo the Wanderer and Mark Crilley's Akiko on the Planet Smoo. I have a fair collection of Groo, but I've been looking for Akiko for a while now. Disappointingly, they only have the novel of Akiko on the Planet Smoo and not the original comic, though they do have six* volumes of Akiko's further illustrated adventures. So far I've read volumes one through three, which comprise the tale of The Menace of Alia Rellapor. It's lovely stuff, and highly recommended for children of all ages.

On the Groo side of things, I picked up The Most Intelligent Man in the World and Groo and Rufferto. The latter is particularly remarkable for a highly detailed five-page index.

Kinokuniya used to be my local bookstore, so I was disappointed when they closed their store. I was rather happier when they opened their new store in the Galleries Victoria (across the road from the Queen Victora Building in Sydney). The old store wasn't small, but the new one is at least five times the size. Now they've been there for a while and have had a chance to fill all that space with books, and I have to say that they are probably now my second favourite bookstore. First, of course, is Galaxy, Sydney's Science Fiction bookstore, where I have been a faithful customer for twenty years.

Not only do Kinokuniya have lots of stuff I want (first rule for success in business: have something people want), but their prices are reasonable, and they gave me a discount (10% on Tuesday, 15% when I went back today), and they gave me some free gift vouchers, and coupons good for 20% off in January and February.

Now all of you go away for a little while, as I still have three volumes of Akiko* to read.

* And another one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:09 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I've got 50,000 of them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:11 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And it's not even that expensive. Wonder if there's an Australian release planned...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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