Reading Geek: The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

 

My 2019 resolution reading schedule was temporarily derailed today by the arrival of The Murders of Molly Southbourne, by English author Tade Thompson.  At 117 pages, it's a surprisingly thin text in the current monumental science fiction marketplace, not to mention a bit pricey at $13.75 CAD. 

Regardless, I was intrigued by the concept for the novel*:  imagine if any time you cut yourself, your spilled blood created a perfect duplicate of you that wanted to kill you.

Because I'm a quick reader, 117 pages is nothing - I was able to split the book between my bus ride home and some time on the couch after dinner while Karli watched The Bachelor, and finish it off the day it was received,

The story starts out well, and has a suitably karmic ending, but there were a few spots in the middle that didn't quite add up, and a couple of dead ends in the body of the narrative that I would like to have seen explored further.

I was also a bit disappointed to learn that Molly Southbourne's unusual condition may be caused by an experimental drug taken (in both senses of the word) by her mother - I might have been more satisfied if there had never been an explanation for the problem, just have it be a fact of her life like breathing or sleeping.

Summary:  a quick, entertaining read, with a unique and original concept, well written, with some excellent descriptive passages.  On the down side, it lacks a certain amount of internal consistency, and it might have helped the story out if Mr. Thompson had written a few more pages.  Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was, an unusual short conceptual piece, and plan to hunt down some of Mr. Thompson's other work based on my initial introduction to his style.

- Sid

* Technically speaking, it's probably a novella - according to the internet, a novella is "between 17,500 and 40,000 words", but Mr. Thompson doesn't provide a word count.

Resolution.

 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the futuristic year of 2019 - yes, I'm fully aware of all the science fiction movies set in 2019 that don't particularly match what is now the present:  Blade Runner, Daybreakers, Akira, The Island, The Running Man, and apparently The Road, although I have no recollection of the date being mentioned in either the book or the movie.*

And Dark, was Dark not set in 2019?

Regardless, with the new year upon us, I feel obliged to look at the results of last year's resolution to make a dent in my backlog of paper novels, to the tune of one a week.  As is so often the case, I didn't manage to keep up with my initial burst of enthusiasm, but if nothing else, I think that I at least managed to break even between reducing the backlog and new acquisitions.

In my defense, I did do some re-reading as well, but overall I wish that I had managed to do better than I did, the books that I did read made for entertaining additions to my repertoire. (Although, to be honest, part of the reason for my non-compliance can be blamed on a couple of books that simply did not hold my interest for a variety of reasons.)

However, it's a new year, and with that, I can make a fresh start with the same goal. I've kicked things off with The Fifth Season, the first book in N. K. Jemisin's award-winning The Broken Earth trilogy - my apologies to all of the nay-sayers who claimed that Jemisin's Best Novel Hugo wins were the result of political correctness, but as it turns out, she's actually just quite a good writer. The Fifth Season was a very good book -  imaginative, unique, clever, and well-written - and I'm looking forward to the next two in the trilogy.

Sadly, I'm retrenching in terms of visual media.  I'd love to be watching everything that's out there in the marketplace, but I feel that I'm just too far in the hole to catch up.  As such, I'm going to concentrate on core programming like Star Trek: Discovery - I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually a bit relieved that Doctor Who is taking a hiatus for 2019, I can use the break for something else.  To be honest, I haven't even watched the New Year's special yet, hopefully I can get that out of the way before the 2020 season starts.

Right - 2020:  that will be Edge of Tomorrow, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, A Quiet Place and Reign of Fire.

Happy New Year to all!

- Sid

* And, really, when you look at that list, I have no regrets that the future has proven inadequate to those visions of it from the past.  I think that Blade Runner is the best of a bad lot in terms of possible futures from that particular collection of options.

Geekmas 2018: Epilogue.

Christmas having come and gone, I can only say that I was overwhelmed by the generosity displayed by the gifts that I received - my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved.

However, to my mild surprise, I received only a single geek-oriented gift - a mug from my friend Chris that commemorates the ill-fated Pabodie Expedition of 1930, sent forth by Maine's Miskatonic University in order to secure deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various points of the antarctic continent (as detailed in H.P. Lovecraft's The Mountains of Madness).  Thanks for keepin' the faith, Chris!

Well, as the saying goes, if you want something done, do it yourself.  I received a good range of Amazon™ gift cards - which I can certainly see as a sensible alternative to trying to coordinate selections from my gift list - and as such, I decided to pick out a few things from that list on behalf of those people.

As a result, currently en route from various locations in Amazon™'s far-flung mercantile empire are: a box set of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy; Seed of Destruction, the first Hellboy omnibus collection; The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson, a novel which has been sitting on the wish list for a couple of years; and a DVD copy of The Sword and the Sorcerer from an Amazon™ affiliate located in Germany - hopefully I correctly ordered the NTSC version.  To describe this 1982 epic fantasy as a classic really doesn't do it justice on a multitude of levels, and I'm quite looking forward to revisiting this trashy 80s TV-star vehicle.

As a spontaneous selection that was NOT on the list (prompted by Boxing Day pricing) I ordered Season One of The Expanse, the Syfy series* based on the novels and novelettes by James S. A. Corey, AKA Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.  The books are a remarkable combination of creativity and realism, and although I had some minor issues with casting, I'm hopeful that the positive fan responses that I've seen indicate that the series has managed to redeem Syfy's somewhat unfortunate record for adaptation.

Once again, my thanks to the various friends and relatives who made these purchases possible.  I hope everyone reading this had a merry Christmas, and my best wishes to all for the New Year.  Here we are again, half way out of the dark...

- Sid

* To be accurate, Syfy for the first two seasons, now an Amazon Prime™ property.

Earthrise.

Apollo 8: December 24th, 1968.

- Sid

The Birthday Trilogy, Part 4.

Photo courtesy of MasterClass

Through the combination of a real sense of purpose and an enormous amount of work on behalf of a lot of people, we can make impossible things happen.

Chris Hadfield, Masterclass

Dear Colin:

Hello again!  Sorry to hear about your cold - I hope that you can take some time off over the holidays to recover.  Also sorry to hear about the Ralph and wine disaster, which, somehow, sounds like another typical episode from the Campbell Brothers Chronicles.

It's been a few months since my thank-you note regarding your birthday gift, so I thought I should take a few minutes to bring you up to speed on progress.

I'm a little behind on the schedule that I laid out at the time, but, as John Lennon points out, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I strongly needed a break from scholastic activity after my online safety course*, and as such didn't sign up for the Chris Hadfield Masterclass on Space Exploration until just Thursday of this last week.  However, I'm now part of Commander Hadfield's virtual classroom, and I have to say that I have absolutely no regrets about my purchase.

The course is made up of just over seven and a half hours of video**, a downloadable 97 page PDF workbook which also links the student to a wide variety of pertinent content, an online discussion group, and an Office Hours module for submitting questions to the Commander.

(And, to be honest, it's the last two that really make the investment worthwhile - I'm more than confident that a quick search through the shadier parts of the Internet would have revealed an archive containing downloadable copies of both the videos and the workbook.)

I'm quite impressed by both the quality and the quantity of the course material, and as you know, I set high standards for this sort of thing. The production values for the videos are superb, and with over seven and a half hours of content, I'm looking forward to hearing the Commander's experienced and anecdotal viewpoint on being an astronaut and space exploration in general.  At this point in his career, Hadfield is a seasoned professional speaker, and his manner in front of the camera is natural and sincere - he's the perfect instructor for a course like this.

The accompanying workbook is well laid out, and the photos are an excellent bonus.  I don't think that any of the linked content is unique to the course, but the manner in which it's tied into the lesson structure gives it more relevancy than it would have as the results of a random Web search.

It's obvious that I'm not going to walk away from the last lesson and expect that NASA will add me to the next mission to the ISS, but I don't think anyone would expect that - the course is intended to offer some privileged insight into the process from the viewpoint of someone with a lot of experience from a wide variety of involvement, and as such, it's exactly what it should be.

In the case of my planned swordplay class at Vancouver's Academie Duello, procrastination actually ended up working well for me.  The centre is having a Christmas sale on their classes, and I was able to purchase a gift coupon for a Longsword Fundamentals course that brought the normal $135 fee down to $99 plus tax.  As you know, I was originally going to sign up for a January course, but the last couple of months have not been terribly cooperative in terms of gym attendance, so my new plan is to take January for a month of preparatory workouts, and then switch to longsword in February.

And that's the news, my friend.  Take care of yourself, and happy holidays to you and Jennifer!

- Sid

* Just for the record, I managed an A, with an average mark of 92%.  I might have done better if it hadn't had so much overlap with my honeymoon.

** A total which I added up on my own for 29 videos ranging in length from just under three minutes to almost 30 - and honestly, base 60 math is a nuisance.

Geekmas 2018: "... if all else fails, surprise me!"

In my Geekmas 2018 gift list posting, I provided the usual list of possible gifts, but, in a bit of a departure from previous years, I urged potential gift buyers to surprise me.  After all, it’s a big marketplace, and I’m not buying as many books as I used to, picking a novel that I don’t already own is not the challenge that it once was.

In the case of Brennan, this year’s workplace Secret Santa, he successfully accepted the challenge, and presented me with a copy of Mage Against The Machine, by Shaun Barger. It’s his first novel, and from what I can gather it’s a possibly young adult genre mix of magic and technological post-apocalyptic AI warfare.  Because it’s a first novel, I’ve got nothing to go on regarding Mr. Barger’s work, so I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s come up with.

Now all we have to do is work on the "secret" part of the process -  thanks again, Brennan, but writing your name on the gift tag does somewhat take away from the mystery of it all.

- Sid