Friday, April 27, 2007
What I'm reading:
Virtual Light, William Gibson. Wiki
A Holiday for Murder, Agatha Christie.
Wild Talent, Wilson 'Bob" Tucker.
The doc here at the study noticed I had some books, and, joking, asked for book reports, so I pointed him here to my blog,and he's checked it out. So maybe I should update the "what i'm reading" category. He's also offered to buy the Murrow bio.
Virtual Light is one of Gibson's earlier novels, after Neuromancer had nearly singlehandedly created the mirrorshades/cyberpunk genre. Neuromancer had an impact sort of like Snow Crash. I can't think of a representative first book of the "New Wave" 1960s trend in SF. Some people would point to Bug Jack Barron. Also I'm not saying Neuromancer was the first, only that it has the reputation of being that sort of a book. Virtual Light is solidly within the cyberpunk genre. Some of Gibson's later work is less so. I liked, and blogged last year about, Pattern Recognition, but it's less distinctively cyberpunk.
This isn't my first read of Virtual Light, it's just the first time I've owned a copy. Back a few years ago when I had both time and money, I used to go about once a month to a club in Muncie owned by my friend Mistress Moth. It was a Stand and Model club (S&M) where a lot of the time, but not all of the time, there wasn't much happening, so often I'd borrow the copy of Virtual Light that was for sale and read another chapter. I don't remember at the moment if I ever got all the way to the ending. My current copy is hardback; the one at the club was illustrated, semi-graphic novel style.
The book itself? Plot: Girl steals something, goons look for her, told alternative her perspective and that of one of the goons. But it's more about setting: a dystopian SF (San Francisco) in which the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and both sets live interesting lives. The significance of the book is the cleverness of the description of the social changes resulting from the technology changes. The writing is also good - that is, some people would argue it's not about what happens, it's about how he tells it. But I think it's about the world he's created as a setting for the story.
Another book I'm reading, but seem to have left at home, is an Agatha Cristie murder mystery, where I can't quite remember if I've read it before. She wrote80 66 of those, selling literally a billion copies, making her second only to Shakespeare, and they are somewhat similar, but this one seems a little too familiar, but less so than it should be for a book if I've read it before. My memory isn't what I'd like it to be.
Cristie, like Gibson, is known, not so much for the cleverness of the solutions to the mysteries, as for the setting. English county houses, retired colonels, the sort also found in Sayers and Waugh and Wodehouse. To most of us, this world is as alien as Gibson's SF SF. I'm on the invitation list to one annual weekend house party at horse farm in Kentucky, where one of the beds is the other of the pair of the one Markie Post is infamous for jumping on in the Lincoln Bedroom of the Clinton White House. And I have a friend who was raised by his uncles, one of whom was the butler to an English gentleman at his country house. The other "uncle" was the gentleman in question. I knew one of them slightly and the other quite well, both are dead now and so, mostly, is the world they lived in. But if a billion copies of her books have been sold, this world has a second life, in the minds of the people who've read her stories.
I was reading it a few days ago, when I came up here to interview for the study. They had told me my labs and physical would be Tuesday, but when I got here they said the physical would be Wednesday, so I had a day of nothing to do and nowhere to do it, so I explored Kalamazoo a little bit, reading the Christie at a coffee shop, then at Rice King, where my order was taken by a 5th grader, Joey, the kind who is smarter than the average contestant on "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?", the new Jeff Foxworthy game show. I may update this post if I remember the title of the Cristie.
Ah, "A Holiday for Murder" better known as Hercule Poirot's Christmas. 1939.
When multi-millionaire Simeon Lee unexpectedly invites his family to gather at his home for Christmas, the gesture is met with suspicion by many of the guests. Simeon is intent on playing a deadly and sadistic game with his family. In the post above, I mention the three cats I live with.
One of them is named Hercule, and there's a Francesca,and I forget the third. Hercule can probably solve locked room mysteries, he just doesn't share the answer, just strokes his whiskers.
Wilson Tucker is a fairly minor science fiction author. This book is pretty good, for an SF book from 1954, pleasant light reading. As far as I know he's never won a Hugo,{oops - fan fiction Hugo, 1970} his books aren't soon to be a major motion picture. But when I used to go to science fiction conventions in the midwest, Bob was treated like a god, pretty girls on both arms who were wearing bodypaint and not much else, a bottle of jack daniels in his hand, a song in his heart. It was the heart that got to him - last I heard he was on doctors orders to slow down a bit,and that was long enough ago he's probably dead by now. [yup: 1914-2006.]The usual process is that I know science fiction authors by their books,and maybe later meet them in person, where Bob is someone I'd met and only later caught up with his books. This one, Wild Talent, is about a boy, later a man, who finds he can read minds, and becomes involved in cold war espionage drama. It's ok. He starts off as a movie projectionist before being drafted. Tucker worked as a movie projectionist while writing 20 novels, numerous short stories, innumerable fan letters,and attending lots of cons over 60 years. http://www.printsations.com/WTucker.htm
Virtual Light, William Gibson. Wiki
A Holiday for Murder, Agatha Christie.
Wild Talent, Wilson 'Bob" Tucker.
The doc here at the study noticed I had some books, and, joking, asked for book reports, so I pointed him here to my blog,and he's checked it out. So maybe I should update the "what i'm reading" category. He's also offered to buy the Murrow bio.
Virtual Light is one of Gibson's earlier novels, after Neuromancer had nearly singlehandedly created the mirrorshades/cyberpunk genre. Neuromancer had an impact sort of like Snow Crash. I can't think of a representative first book of the "New Wave" 1960s trend in SF. Some people would point to Bug Jack Barron. Also I'm not saying Neuromancer was the first, only that it has the reputation of being that sort of a book. Virtual Light is solidly within the cyberpunk genre. Some of Gibson's later work is less so. I liked, and blogged last year about, Pattern Recognition, but it's less distinctively cyberpunk.
This isn't my first read of Virtual Light, it's just the first time I've owned a copy. Back a few years ago when I had both time and money, I used to go about once a month to a club in Muncie owned by my friend Mistress Moth. It was a Stand and Model club (S&M) where a lot of the time, but not all of the time, there wasn't much happening, so often I'd borrow the copy of Virtual Light that was for sale and read another chapter. I don't remember at the moment if I ever got all the way to the ending. My current copy is hardback; the one at the club was illustrated, semi-graphic novel style.
The book itself? Plot: Girl steals something, goons look for her, told alternative her perspective and that of one of the goons. But it's more about setting: a dystopian SF (San Francisco) in which the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and both sets live interesting lives. The significance of the book is the cleverness of the description of the social changes resulting from the technology changes. The writing is also good - that is, some people would argue it's not about what happens, it's about how he tells it. But I think it's about the world he's created as a setting for the story.
Another book I'm reading, but seem to have left at home, is an Agatha Cristie murder mystery, where I can't quite remember if I've read it before. She wrote
Cristie, like Gibson, is known, not so much for the cleverness of the solutions to the mysteries, as for the setting. English county houses, retired colonels, the sort also found in Sayers and Waugh and Wodehouse. To most of us, this world is as alien as Gibson's SF SF. I'm on the invitation list to one annual weekend house party at horse farm in Kentucky, where one of the beds is the other of the pair of the one Markie Post is infamous for jumping on in the Lincoln Bedroom of the Clinton White House. And I have a friend who was raised by his uncles, one of whom was the butler to an English gentleman at his country house. The other "uncle" was the gentleman in question. I knew one of them slightly and the other quite well, both are dead now and so, mostly, is the world they lived in. But if a billion copies of her books have been sold, this world has a second life, in the minds of the people who've read her stories.
I was reading it a few days ago, when I came up here to interview for the study. They had told me my labs and physical would be Tuesday, but when I got here they said the physical would be Wednesday, so I had a day of nothing to do and nowhere to do it, so I explored Kalamazoo a little bit, reading the Christie at a coffee shop, then at Rice King, where my order was taken by a 5th grader, Joey, the kind who is smarter than the average contestant on "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?", the new Jeff Foxworthy game show. I may update this post if I remember the title of the Cristie.
Ah, "A Holiday for Murder" better known as Hercule Poirot's Christmas. 1939.
When multi-millionaire Simeon Lee unexpectedly invites his family to gather at his home for Christmas, the gesture is met with suspicion by many of the guests. Simeon is intent on playing a deadly and sadistic game with his family. In the post above, I mention the three cats I live with.
One of them is named Hercule, and there's a Francesca,and I forget the third. Hercule can probably solve locked room mysteries, he just doesn't share the answer, just strokes his whiskers.
Wilson Tucker is a fairly minor science fiction author. This book is pretty good, for an SF book from 1954, pleasant light reading. As far as I know he's never won a Hugo,{oops - fan fiction Hugo, 1970} his books aren't soon to be a major motion picture. But when I used to go to science fiction conventions in the midwest, Bob was treated like a god, pretty girls on both arms who were wearing bodypaint and not much else, a bottle of jack daniels in his hand, a song in his heart. It was the heart that got to him - last I heard he was on doctors orders to slow down a bit,and that was long enough ago he's probably dead by now. [yup: 1914-2006.]The usual process is that I know science fiction authors by their books,and maybe later meet them in person, where Bob is someone I'd met and only later caught up with his books. This one, Wild Talent, is about a boy, later a man, who finds he can read minds, and becomes involved in cold war espionage drama. It's ok. He starts off as a movie projectionist before being drafted. Tucker worked as a movie projectionist while writing 20 novels, numerous short stories, innumerable fan letters,and attending lots of cons over 60 years. http://www.printsations.com/WTucker.htm
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