townx

I keep thinking about writing something here, but the problem is once I get started, that's a whole evening gone, waffling.

In particular, I've been thinking about books a lot. So here are some book-related nuggets. It all goes a bit Victor Meldrew by the end, I warn you now.

Space operas I've read

I recently read Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep alongside Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns. Both are galaxy-spanning space opera, both full of artificial intelligences, alien races, and dogfights in space. Both highly entertaining. But Vinge's book was written about 20 years before Reynolds', and it's pretty obvious Reynolds is a big fan of Vinge. Not to the point of copying, but the plotlines of both share similarities (humans caught up in a battle involving AI systems/races which have reached god-like power). And Vinge is a much, much better writer: his characters are more sympathetic, his scenery more memorable, his aliens more interesting, and his narrative pace tighter and more dramatic. So if you want some space opera, I'd go for Vinge first, and Reynolds second.

I might read Jack Vance soon, as a brief look at one of his books (The Star King) suggests Vinge was inspired by his work (e.g. both use the term The Beyond to refer to the far reaches of the galaxy)...

Hay-on-Wye visit

I visited Hay on Wye with my family for a couple of days last week. We've made this an annual pilgrimage, as we all love going there so much. I found a lot of good books; in particular, Richard Booth's bookshop was a fantastic source of unusual sf: see the town shop catalogue and castle bookshop catalogue for a fraction of the stock.

I ended up buying:

• China Mountain Zhang - Maureen F. McHugh
• Greybeard - Brian Aldiss
• Underlay - Barry Malzberg
• Galaxies - Barry Malzberg
• The Last Transaction - Barry Malzberg
• The Opiuchi Hotline - John Varley
• The Snow Queen - Joan D. Vinge
• The Peace War - Vernor Vinge
• The Humanoids - Jack Williamson
• Mockingbird - Walter Tevis
• Bring the Jubilee - Ward Moore
• Walk to the End of the World - Suzy McKee Charnas
• The Breaking of Northwall - Paul O. Williams
• Gray Matters - William Hjortsberg
• Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
• Star King - Jack Vance
• Stolen Faces - Michael Bishop
• A Mirror for Observers - Edgar Pangborn
• Other Days, Other Eyes - Bob Shaw

Each book cost me £2 to £2.50: cheaper than Amazon marketplace, but not as cheap as I would have liked. I think I'm lucky because sf books are still in a bit of a ghetto; other types of paperback seem a bit overpriced (a symptom of the tourist popularity of the place). I love going there, but my best finds are still when I get hold of an unusual 1960s/1970s paperback for 30p in a small charity shop.

My tactic when visiting is to make a list of specific books to look for: we have about 3-4 hours browsing time, and there are just too many books to look at all of them. On this occasion, I was aiming to find a few "classics" (Moore, Varley, Pangborn, Shaw), interesting books by authors I've recently discovered (Vernor Vinge, Michael Bishop), and books by authors I always look out for (Malzberg - often tricky to find, as I'm not sure all his books made it to publication in Europe). I had a list of about 50 authors/books, but passed up on a few I found because the book wasn't in particularly good condition, or it didn't look so good in the flesh, or were too expensive.

Madeleine chose 17 books (we had to limit her to 1 or 2 per shop, as she kept gathering piles of half a dozen or more - children's books are reasonably priced, though the Children's Bookshop is a rip-off with common paperbacks at £3); Joel got 4 picture books (he mainly wanted to walk around the shops, rather than look at books); and Nicola got about 5 (her favourite shop there is Murder and Mayhem).

Anyhow, now I've got so many great books to read, I don't know where to start.

On Bookmooch

Bookmooch is a great little site: basically you list books you want to give away, and books you'd like to acquire. Each time you give a book away, you get points; each time you acquire a book, you spend points (so no money changes hands). You get 3 points for sending abroad, 1 point for sending to your own country; asking for a book from your own country costs 1 point; asking for a book internationally costs 2 points. I've exchanged quite a few books on there. But a few recent experiences have soured it for me:

• People giving away bookcrossing books
  I like the idea of bookcrossing.com very much, but don't like it when people take bookcrossing books and put them onto bookmooch without mentioning it. bookcrossing books are intended to be given away after they've been read; I don't mooch books off bookmooch to give them away again, necessarily: it might be that I want to keep the book after I've read it (I like collecting books). I'd feel guilty if I got hold of a bookcrossing book via bookmooch and kept it. I recently got a bookcrossing book unintentionally off bookmooch, so now I've read it I'm going to have to leave it somewhere for someone else to pick up.
• People refusing to send mooches internationally
  People on bookmooch have the option not to send internationally, or to have you ask first to see if they'll agree to send internationally. While in principle I understand this (from what US citizens tell me, postage internationally is exorbitant; in the UK I've found it to be fine), it is still galling to see books you want but are unable to get because the person won't send internationally. Even more galling if you ask them to send internationally and they say "No". This is really an issue with bookmooch: it shouldn't show books you can't mooch because the person won't send internationally.
• People sending books in terrible condition
  I got one book off bookmooch which had some kind of toxic sticky gunk on its cover. It's so bad I can't put it next to another book on my shelf. I'm reading it at the moment, taking care not to put it down on top of any other books after each reading session. Once I've read it I'm going to have to bin it, as I'd be ashamed to give it to anyone else.
  I don't mind dog ears, crumpled spines, bent pages, limited water damage etc.; but a cover which glues itself to other books goes beyond acceptable.
• Poor user experience
  The bookmooch website really doesn't lend itself to regular use, and does a poor job of tracking what tasks are pending and what you've done. One example: if you ask someone to send internationally, there's no record of this on the site: you have to keep the email to remind you. But despite that, you can mooch the book anyway, before the person you asked has responded (the system should block until the person agrees to send internationally, but doesn't for some reason). Then add to that the fact that reservations expire after a week, even if the person doesn't respond to your request within that time. So you can be in a situation where you've asked someone to send internationally, they haven't responded, and your reservation is about to expire. What to do? I tend to mooch it anyway, explaining why, and saying they can cancel if they wish.
  Another example is the wishlist. It defaults to showing you just the books you've wishlisted, and not related editions. You can show related editions if you want, but you have to click. Each moochable book has a link next to it; but if a related edition is moochable, there's no link. What you really need is a list of "moochable items which are on my wishlist or related to my wishlist" (this is roughly what the RSS feed supplies), with a link for each.
  Also, there are more general issues, like the terrible search engine, which as well as returning very poor results is also horribly slow; and the abysmal HTML, resembling something produced by Microsoft FrontPage sometime around 2000, bloated and nigh on impossible to screen scrape.
  (I know I could do better (I spent two years working on Prism after all), which is, I think, what makes it so frustrating to use.)

All in all, while it worked out well for a while and I got some good books out of it, I'd actually rather spend £3 on Amazon to get the books I want, rather than go through the hassle of using bookmooch. Shame. I'll leave my wishlist on there, but I'm not going to put anything in my inventory for the time being.

I'm 40 this year (not yet, I hasten to add). Yes, I know it's no big deal it's a round number, that's just human preference for powers of 10. Anyway, it does seem like some kind of milestone in my life, for whatever reasons. And as I have a generally introspective mind, and a good dose of self-absorption, and this is my blog, I'm going to write a few notes about it.

Not sure what got me started down this path, but yesterday I dug out a load of old school books, note books, board game designs, roleplaying game campaign books, poetry, short stories - it's all still out there in the garage. But what struck me, rather than "where did all my dreams go? what am I doing with my life?", the usual things accompanying the average mid-life crisis, I found myself thinking "actually, I'm pretty much the same person I was when I was 12; I haven't really changed much; I still believe the same things". I mentioned this to Nicola (my wife) and she said something like "that's one thing you always are: consistent, stable, level-headed". Though she made it sound better than that: I'm paraphrasing.

So, where is my evidence for this. Cue quotations from old school books etc.:

"There is not anybody that I would really like to be, but if I had to be someone else, I think it would be Arthur C. Clarke...I would not like to be him because of the mysteries he has investigated but because of his great output of short stories and books..." (June 22nd 1982; still love science fiction, would love to be a great SF writer, but realise that probably that's not my calling)

"There are three things I would change in the world if I became, as it were, a 'supreme dictator'. 1. Banning of vivisection: all animals should be treated as part of life, and if they are destroyed or harmed we would be affecting our future lives... 2. Freedom of speech: I would give everybody in the world the freedom to speak how they wish... 3. Nuclear war: I would try to stop the production of nuclear weapons." (December 15th c. 1983; basically I was a hippie then and I still am; I think that's quite forward thinking for someone living in a provincial backwater in the early 1980s - probably my mum's influence)

There's really no point going on about achievements since then etc.; you can read my about page to find out what I've done with myself all this time. I don't think I'll ever "do enough" to say I've finished.

More important, though, are things which have meant a lot to me over the past few months. These are the kind of things we're living for:

• Sledging in the local park with Madeleine (my daughter) on Christmas Eve 2009. This was just the most wonderful day for me: exhilirating, laughing with my daughter, expectations of Christmas the next day, looking forward to warming up in the cafe for lunch. I'll treasure this one for a long time.
• How Joel (my son) loves to throw himself at me, fling his arms around me, wrestle me, nestle into my neck, calls me "my daddy"; his carefree grin as he ambles around the garden looking for interesting things.
• Gaming night with Nicola (my wife): it's one time in the week when we sit down together, just the two of us, and get a chance to do nothing but spend time together, chat, have a drink. Sometimes we're both too knackered, but most Sunday nights, that's what we do. Carcassonne and Dominion are our current arenas. It's also great working at home, as we get to see each other a bit more and meet for lunch once a week in the local cafe. Good to be together.
• Paul (my current manager) having the faith in me to persuade me to work at Intel, when I was at a really low point, virtually no self confidence, no self belief, and practically telling him I couldn't do the job. He was right, and I was wrong. It's taken me a while to build myself up again, but I finally feel like I'm getting into my stride and being useful.
• Rediscovering my love of SF. I made a concerted effort this year to read more, and have been having a great time doing so. I've read quite a lot of classic SF this year, and have made some good discoveries (Grass by Sherri S. Tepper is my current one, which is really good, and actually brought tears to my eyes). I'm convinced reading fiction, great fiction, makes me a better person.
• Writing more music and releasing an album. The release will happen in the next few weeks, and it's going to be very small (it's a tiny net label), but I'm really pleased and grateful someone else (Kevin Busby) has enough faith in my music enough to put their name to it.

While digging around, I also found this rather excellent (and very 1980s and corny, obviously around the time of Close Encounters) birthday card from my family; inside it says "HOPE YOUR BIRTHDAY IS OUT OF THIS WORLD!" There's also some of my mum's handwriting: "To Elliot, lots of love Mum, Dad, Dean & Chloë" (she always put the umlaut on Chloe). Finding some of her writing, that made me a bit sad (she died a few years ago of cancer). Here's the picture, anyway:

(Looking at this now, the sentimental part of me suddenly finds this picture quite fitting as a visual metaphor for what it's like to grow up...)

No earth-shattering revelation to come to, no character progression. But perhaps that is my point. What's important is knowing who you are, and doing things which make you (and those around you) feel good.

I noticed this Zombie Haiku book yesterday: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1600610706

Which reminded me of this zombie haiku I wrote when I was about 12 (27 years ago - ouch):

A noxious zombie
eats a mouldy, worm-filled leg
in a rancid cave.

Which isn't very good (though vivid enough for me to remember and obviously ahead of its time); and not strictly haiku (it has no "kireji", or its closest equivalent in English, i.e. "a dignified ending, concluding the verse with a heightened sense of closure" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kireji). So I rewrote it while in the bath last night (probably too much information there...):

An ashen zombie
gnaws a muddy, worm-filled leg:
tears run over bones.

Hopefully, this will enable you to see how much I've progressed as an artist.

Update: After having written this, I read this surprisingly relevant blog entry about how we see our artwork when we're young (by way of Rotating Corpse), how our perceptions of it change, and even how art comes to have value.

Last year I only managed to read 18 books. Pretty poor going. They were:

Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Magnetism and other stories - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everything Is Miscellaneous
The Eternal Champion - Michael Moorcock
Phoenix in Obsidian - Michael Moorcock
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate - Michael Moorcock
Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
Breakthrough - Richard Cowper
Brontomek! - Michael Coney
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
400 Billion Stars - Paul J. McAuley
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Tactics of Conquest - Barry Malzberg
Secret Harmonies - Paul J. McAuley
Inside Intel - Tim Jackson
Imperial Earth - Arthur C. Clarke
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

Of those, The Road was easily the best. I dread to think what a shambles the film will turn it into.

I've also updated my list of important books to include one or two I read last year, and some others I remembered. Plus I created a separate section for my favourite sf books.

This year I'm planning to read some sf classics. Here's the list I'm starting from (as I already have copies of all these):

A Case of Conscience - James Blish
Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg
Man Plus - Frederik Pohl
Venus Plus X - Theodore Sturgeon
Davy - Edgar Pangborn
The Space Merchants - Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
Blood Music - Greg Bear
Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner
Time Out of Joint - Philip K. Dick
The Embedding - Ian Watson
The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
On Wings of Song - Thomas M. Disch
Ringworld - Larry Niven
The Child Garden - Geoff Ryman

Let's see how I get on.

I was going to put "probably", but then decided that, no, this is my favourite:

http://ageofuncertainty.blogspot.com/

I love the way this chap writes. Mainly about second-hand books he's found and/or read, but often about their cover art, the ephemera he finds inside them, brilliant expositions about small towns he's visited, and other bits and pieces. There's a certain gentle Englishness, quiet pathos, and calm reflection about his work which strikes just the right balance for me.

Great Christmas holiday. Shame it's over.

Enjoyed watching lots of films through Sky+. Jonathon Creek, Gavin and Stacey, and Wallace and Gromit were good. Got the broadband working (though Sky's DNS servers are knackered at the moment).

Joel started eating solid food: he's starting to get the hang of it. Chloe and Ian came for Christmas day and we spent most of the time playing on the Wii and eating.

Presents I got:

1. Mario Karts Wii plus extra steering wheel
2. Made to Stick book
3. Everything is Miscellaneous book
4. Hello Young Lovers by Sparks
5. Missiles by The Dears
6. The Thirteenth Floor DVD
7. Hot Shots (I and II) DVD
8. The Apple Source Book
9. A garden fork
10. A bag for holding string
11. A puzzle book (I realised I love puzzles while on holiday)
12. A planetarium
13. Spy pens
14. Shut the Box game

Back to work Monday. Also need to stop eating so much crap, as I think I've put a few pounds on over Christmas.

And yes, Happy New Year and all that.

Seems to be passing more and more quickly.

We got Sky+ last weekend. The best thing about it for me, at the moment, is that it's great being able to watch a different comedy film every night. I am still in the "bewildered by choice" phase of engagement, but gradually working out where stuff is.

I feel quite unprepared for Christmas. I've done most (all?) of my shopping, but I need an audit to decide whether I need to get more stuff.

Joel is getting to the point where he recognises me when I come home, and he's all smiles. Lovely. Makes up for him waking up at 5.30 some mornings: after which he ends up on the lying on bathroom floor while I'm having a shower, so Nicola can get some rest. He goes onto solid food next week, having breakfast with me and Madeleine.

Madeleine is getting on well with her reading (can read most short words), likes doing number squares and crosswords, still does drawing every morning when she gets up. She's growing up fast. For her birthday she got several games, so we've been playing Junior Monopoly a few times.

I haven't been doing much. I've played with Google App Engine a couple of evenings, but apart from that, haven't been coding outside work. Too tired. Went to see John Shuttleworth live at the weekend: well worth seeing.

Another year nearly over. Personal achievements have been thin on the ground (far fewer extra-curricular activities). I've read about the same number of books I do every year; still not managed my goal of one per week. 35 to be precise. Here's the list:

• Orbitsville (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/2353126)
• Rendezvous with Rama (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/253150)
• Non-Stop (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/75264)
• Enemies of the System (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/670914)
• The Search (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/167067)
• The Committed Men (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/739473)
• In Solitary (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/2822788)
• Saturday (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/2058961)
• The War Lord of the Air (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3756753)
• The Rose (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3792182)
• Cemetery World (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/1152767)
• The Sleeping Sorceress (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/609968)
• Fireclown (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3832070)
• The Knight of the Swords (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3837445)
• The Queen of the Swords (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/2682127)
• The King of the Swords (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3854971)
• The Fountains of Paradise (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/13323)
• The Bull and the Spear (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/2274557)
• The Oak and the Ram (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3897707)
• Star Maker (Early Classics of Science Fiction) (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/82366)
• The Void Captain's Tale (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/144163)
• The Penultimate Truth (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/718677)
• On A Planet Alien (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/1150728)
• The Wisdom of Crowds (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/52270)
• Bonjour Laziness (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/77398)
• The Land Leviathan (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/1497844)
• Wikinomics (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3545416)
• Needle in a Timestack (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/4873719)
• The Ghost Map (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/2659033)
• More Things in Heaven (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3823282)
• On Chesil Beach (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/3626444)
• Mary (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/5275483)
• The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/117092)
• Bonjour tristesse (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/5317870)
• Pale Fire (finished end December)
• The Sword and the Stallion

Paul responded in a comment to this post. He pointed out that the small thing we may have lost (the ability to concentrate hard on "slow" pleasures) is more than compensated for by what we've gained: almost unlimited horizons, the wealth of the world at our fingertips, i.e. the internet. He's right. I was just being an old curmudgeon. Must have been a downer of a day.

Last night I watched The Rolf Harris Show (the link is to the episode on iPlayer), originally broadcast in 1969. I've always been a bit of a fan of Rolf (mainly because of his Cartoon Time series when I was growing up), but I hadn't seen his variety show before.

What was interesting to me about this show were its expectations about the audience's attention span. After Rolf's intro, we were treated to Ivan Rebroff's rendition of Kalinka. Ivan sang in Russian for 4 or 5 minutes (across 4.5 octaves), standing alone on stage, dressed like a cossack. There is no way you'd get something like this on prime time family television in 2008. There was also an over-long, godawful, but in its way charming, skit on Robin Hood (starring Rolf and Barbara Windsor); an overwrought (but quite entertaining) song by Vince Hill; Val Doonican incongruously singing The Answer (is Blowing in the Wind) and one other; plus The Young Generation doing a dance number called The Continental (here they are dancing to something else).

In some ways, it's a good thing that we no longer have to suffer some of this tedium. But when I found my own fingers itching and my attention drifting, it made me ask myself whether I (and people more generally) have lost something: the ability to enjoy simple pleasures, like a person singing alone onstage. I know that's what BBC 4 and Radio 4 are about, and I know there are plenty of people who appreciate culture in that way. But perhaps the difference is that it's no longer a general feature of the population. TV was much simpler, naive, and dull when I was growing up. Life was much more dull, to be honest. Partly because I grew up in a tiny market town, but largely because everyone was poorer, at least where I lived. By comparison, life today seems to be accelerating, getting bigger, brighter; we get more and more stuff; we endlessly throw things away, change things; and our attention spans narrow, flitting from the old to the new. (I know this isn't an original insight, but Rolf's show brought the issue vividly to my attention.)

My daughter has never had to wait until a particular time of day to watch children's TV; she's always had access to computers, where you can watch virtually any event on YouTube (bees making honey, the moon landing etc.); she's got her own CD player in her room (no TV, for as long as we can prevent it); she gets to go out to lots of parks, museums, the cinema etc.. Thankfully, she loves drawing and writing, and will spend hours making pictures for friends and family, so she can entertain herself. But she has endless opportunities and a wealth of "stuff" which just wasn't the norm when I was growing up in the 70s. Everything is just there, all the time. We try really hard to make sure she appreciates what she's got, and realises how lucky she is. (Though it's hard to instill those values when she earns two or three rewards of pencils, keyrings, stickers, badges etc. for good behaviour at school every week. When I was at school the reward was a book, once a year, for pupils who'd done really well.)

I also watched Survivors last night. Fairly bleak dystopian sf (perhaps the credit crunch is to blame), and I thought reasonably realistic. It made me think along similar lines to watching Rolf: as well as moving further and further into the unreal realm of the media (the hyperreal simulation of the media, even, as Monsieur Baudrillard would have it), we have also moved further and further from our hunter gatherer origins. I thought this show reflected that pretty accurately. The characters in Survivors, faced with a world decimated by a virus, react in a variety of ways: denial, bewilderment, displacement activity, land grabbing. Mostly, though, they hope it will all go away, carry on arguing with each other, blunder around blowing up petrol stations, and don't really know what to do without the infrastructure that modern society relies on. I think I'd be the same in their situation, without my computer and TV and electricity, which makes me a bit sad. Though I can grow vegetables.

One last thing: talking about dystopias always reminds me of what I consider the dystopia par excellence: The Genocides by Thomas Disch. I don't think you can get it in the UK at the moment, but you can probably get it second hand (here it is on Amazon US). The basic story is that aliens have planted crops on the whole of the earth, gradually killing off all the native life except for people. People end up living in the stalks and roots of their gigantic plants, like field mice. The characterisation is fantastic (as with all Disch's work), but what I liked in particular was how the impending extinction of humankind did nothing to dampen their bickering and infighting. I'm sure that's how the world would end.

The West Midlands is the Home of Metal. I hadn't really grasped this until I read this blog entry and had a browse around the Home of Metal site. I'm not particularly a fan of metal (except maybe some of the tracks by Scorn by ex Napalm Death chap Mick Harris, and despite the best efforts of Jono); but it would be good if the West Midlands and Birmingham got more recognition for the good stuff it's brought to the world. You can have a look at Famous Birmingham People for starters (though Arthur Conan Doyle is a bit of stretch: wasn't born here, he just lived here a while). Most notable for me:

• George Cadbury (the chocolate man)
• Tony Hancock
• JRR Tolkein (not born here, but lived here when young; I've visited Sarehole Mill in Birmingham a couple of times, where he surely must have got some inspiration for The Lord of the Rings)
• David Lodge (who taught English at University of Birmingham; I went to a talk he did in the Computer Science department while I was studying there, around the time he wrote Thinks...)

I've lived here since 1994 and feel very defensive of and proud of the region: great people, great places to go, great atmosphere. It's a fine place to live, and I'm glad my children are growing up here.