So Yesterday

It wasn't too long ago that the world (or at least a small portion of the world) was focused on Hollywood, and their orgy of self-congratulation, the Oscars. In my opinion, the worst part of the Oscars is the pre-show red carpet bullsh*t. Every year we get to see the stars who are only at the Oscars because they will be presenting some retrospective feature not because their body of work merits their appearance at the show. The question that must be asked of each of these worthless stars and starlets is, "Who are you wearing?" (The question kind of creeps me out, because they say, "who," not "whose design," or "whose dress," or anything sensible like that. I can just imagine these women wearing their designer skinned and draped over their neck like women used to wear furs in the 1910s and 20s, with the animals head still attached and stuffed like a hunting trophy). The obsession with clothes and fashion is simply something I don't care about at all.

Therefore, Scott Westerfeld's So Yesterday was not the book for me. He's written steampunk novels, he's written novels about vampires (I'll be reviewing the vampire one coming soon), and I could easily get behind those books, but this one is about the ever-elusive and ever-bullsh*t quality of being cool--wearing the right clothes in innovative ways and so forth. I don't care. I could barely be asked to care when I was in high school, when most kids obsessively worry about that crap. Now, with years of hindsight to look back on high school with, I sure as hell am not going to worry about that crap. So, like I said, the book was not for me. I don't fit into the proper target audience.

That being said, Scott Westerfeld, however, is a bang-up writer. The book, despite being about things I couldn't give the slightest crap about, was engaging enough to keep me reading. There were dozens of clever things he did in the writing of the novel as well to keep me smiling and paying attention. For example, he purposefully left all brand names out, but he would describe the brand in a way that would tell you what the name was all the same. For example, when describing Nike, he eschews their name but says, "They were a certain athletic shoe company named after a certain Greek god." There were many more that were even more entertaining. It was a fun game sprinkled throughout the book to identify the brands (which included TV and movie franchises as well) that he was speaking of.

I look forward to reading more Scott Westerfeld in the future, because I know he's written several books to which I would be in the target audience. I just couldn't recommend So Yesterday to you, unless perhaps you watch fashion shows on TV instead of reality shows or narrative shows (they do still do narrative shows on TV somewhere right? Some obscure cable channel or something?) or the red carpet is your favorite part of Oscar night. If that's the case, then this might be exactly right for you.

Anansi Boys

It was only a few months ago that I read my very first Neil Gaiman novel, American Gods. It was a great book, a large, sweeping epic-style novel about all the pagan gods of the world that Americans had brought with them when they immigrated from their countries of origin. Now, here I am, reading another Neil Gaiman book, Anansi Boys. It's set in the same world as that of American Gods, but it's a lot less epic in scale. Instead of trying to incorporate every god that ever was, Gaiman sticks with one smaller mythology, that of the Afro-Caribbean god, Anansi.

I really enjoyed Anansi Boys, and I think one of the main reasons why was because it wasn't so far-reaching as American Gods. Instead of trying to work in vignettes with this god, that god, and the other god, we were able to focus more on the main characters, learn about them, get to know them well, and follow a more linear plot from its inception to its conclusion. I cared so much more for Fat Charlie and Spider the main characters of Anansi Boys than I ever did for Shadow the main character of American Gods.

I listened to the audio version of this story, as read by Lenny Henry. Henry is a very good reader. The guy pulled of a serious number of different accents flawlessly. From the characters of the old ladies, who all hailed originally from the Caribbean; to Fat Charlie and his fiancee, who are stuffy and English; to Spider who is very American, he nailed every one of them. The book was a pleasure to the ears. One of my favorite accents to listen to is Caribbean. There's just something so beautiful about the way they speak in the islands. The book could have been a 300 page grocery list, and, as long as Henry read it in that accent, I'd have been happy. But, bonus for me, the book was really good.

If you haven't read it already, I'd encourage you to check it out. It's been my favorite Niel Gaiman novel yet. Sometime soon I'll get to Coraline, and then we'll see if Anansi Boys can defend its title.

Now, for me, up next is another novel by the author of one of my favorite short stories, "Ass-Hat Magic Spider." I will be reading Scott Westerfeld's YA novel So Yesterday.

I, Robot

I love Isaac Asimov. It's funny, because Asimov has a writing style that is not particularly conducive to being liked. It's not like he writes things in a way as to make them deliberately hard to understand, which seems to be en vogue these days. Instead he has a style of writing in which nothing actually happens. You usually have one or two scientist-types sitting in a room, or in a space ship, or in a robot factory, and they talk about something that has happened. Then, after they've debated things a while, the chapter ends. Then we skip ahead a bit, and find these two (or two other) scientist-types, who are now discussing something else that, again, has already happened. You would think that would be boring, but I don't find it to be so. I love Isaac Asimov.

I've read his Foundation trilogy, and his Elijah Baley robot books, but for some reason, I'd never read what is perhaps his most famous book, I, Robot. So, with some encouragement from Jason Sanford's Book Scouts Of The Galactic Rim, I set out to do so.

It was pure pleasure to me. As is my custom, for the most part, I listened to an audio version of the book. It was read by Scott Brick, who is an excellent reader. The book is actually a collection of Asimov short stories in his robot series. The stories included in it are, Robbie, Runaround, Reason, Catch that Rabbit, Liar!, Little Lost Robot, Escape!, Evidence, and The Evitable Conflict. These stories are no different than most Asimov tales. They involve some strange thing that has occurred to a robot that must be figured out by the scientist-types. Usually, they involve some sort of tug-of-war between the first law and the second or the second and the third. I tell you, though, they are fun stories. I wonder what it would take to get Asimov's estate to let us podcast a story. I know Steve Eley did it once, so it's possible.

I'm not going to go into detail about each story. I'm just going to say that I loved the book, and anyone who is trying to decide whether to read it or not should go for it. You won't be sorry.

I will talk momentarily about the 2004 movie with the same title as this book.A lot of people hated this film. I expected myself to be one of them. When I saw the commercials, which were filled with robots attacking people, I wanted to scream. This movie surely had nothing to do with Asimov's ideas, because after all, how could any robot be attacking a person when there was a first law to prevent that from being possible.

I watched the film, though, and I turned out to like it a lot more than I expected. Rish still ridicules me for that, but I stand by it. Rish one time wanted to do a podcast in which we discussed the movies that we liked that everyone else hates. This film would have been my choice.

Unlike what I expected, which was a wholesale throwing out of Asimov's concepts, instead the movie was a sort of homage to all that Asimov wrote about. Susan Calvin, Alfred Lanning, and Lawrence Robertson all make an appearance. The plot sort of mirrors that of The Little Lost Robot short story from I, Robot. Sure they action-filmed it up, but in the end, there was even a good reason for the robots to be attacking people. It was basically what we discover at the end of Foundation And Earth. Robots evolved to a point that they have gone beyond just helping each man as a separate individual, and they are now trying to help mankind as a whole to supersede their base nature. In Foundation And Earth it is done benignly with telepathy and the like, but in the I, Robot film, it is instead done with violence (but it was an action movie! A friggin' Will Smith movie even!) Asimov wasn't opposed to robots killing people; it happened on occasion. For proof, check out Sally (that one's kind of a bit creepy for an Asimov story).

So, yeah, in the end, since the ideas used in the script seemed to jibe with Asimov's own ideas, I was satisfied with the film. It was fun, and not the travesty that most others I've spoken with about the movie thought it was. At the very least, it was better than that crappy Robin Williams movie, The Bicentennial Man.

Of course, if I sat down and listened to someone who hated the film explain to me why they hated it, I might change my opinion. So, to keep my memories good, I will plug my ears, and chant, "La la la la," at the top of my voice whenever anyone tries.

So, next up for me, I've got to get a listenin' to this library copy I have of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys before I start getting charged late fees.

Breaking Dawn

A couple of years ago, my wife, like many women in America, became a fan of the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I was still clueless, at this time, about this whole phenomenon. There hadn't been movies yet, in fact the movies were still just rumored. My wife read them, and loved them so much that she begged me to read them as well, so that we could discuss them.

Luckily for me, the library had them in audio, and I listened my way through the three books that existed at the time. They were very much written for women. I would not have been surprised to see a white-skinned Fabio gracing the covers of these books. To my dismay, the discussion that my wife and I had afterwards went something like this:

"You finished them?"

"Yes."

"What did you think?"

"Meh, they were all right."

"Oh."

And that was it.

I probably should have quit then and there, but I'm just not that smart. So when the library's audio copy of Breaking Dawn became available, I checked it out, and listened to it. Like its predecessors, it was very, very female oriented, and very much a romance book in disguise as a fantasy/horror novel. There were a lot of times where I found myself simply gagging as Meyer waxed on and on about how wonderful Edward Cullen was, or how wonderful it was to be married to Edward Cullen, or how wonderful...URK...sorry, I just threw up a little in my mouth there. Give me a minute to go get a drink, I'll be right back.

. . .

Sorry about that. I'm doing okay now. Anyway, if Meyer could have refrained from overly romance-booking the story, it could have been an interesting and legitimate fantasy novel. There were ideas in it that were interesting, if not exactly groundbreaking. Unfortunately, the packaging made the contents too undesirable for me.

Worst of all, when I finished, my wife and I talked about it. She'd been waiting a year for me to finally get around to listening to that book after all. The conversation went something like this:

"You finished it?"

"Yes."

"What did you think?"

"Meh, it was all right."

"Oh."

If only I'd learned from the first time.

Guys, avoid these books. Girls, enjoy them. See you next time.

Magic Street

My trip to my local library a while back yeilded a few audio books for me to check out. They weren't part of my whole Science Fiction Reading Project, but I'm grandfathering them in (I suppose that you can't really use that term that way, but I don't care, I'm doing it all the same).

Magic Street is a book by Orson Scott Card that I'd previously never heard of. I've been a fan of Card since I first read Ender's Game back in tenth grade. Since then, I've read the rest of the original Ender quartet. I really enjoyed those books. Then I read the Shadow quartet. Those weren't quite as good. I've also read all the Alvin Maker books, all the Homecoming books, and even some of his standalone novels like Pastwatch, A Planet Called Treason, Hart's Hope, Wyrms, Lost Boys, Treasure Box, and Enchantment. It's probably the most books by a single author that I've read.

Unfortunately, in my mind, his writing has slipped in recent years. Like Stephen King, whose writing was sharp and fast-paced in his early years, Card has fallen off as he's gotten older, and his stories have become bloated and uninteresting. This new book by Card, Magic Street, is no different. It just moved too slowly for it to be very interesting at all. But aside from that, the story, idea behind it all, just didn't catch my attention, it didn't speak to me. The book is a modern fantasy, involving a fairyland that is superimposed over our own world, and incorporating many of the characters from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. All in all it was just too silly for me to take seriously. It was meant to be serious, though. It wasn't a comedy. I think I might be too old for this book, although I don't think it was aimed particularly at younger readers.

In his author's note at the end of the tale, he said that he wrote the book with all black main characters after having been challenged by a friend to do so. His friend was disappointed that black people don't get their equal time in literature. For the percentage of the population that they represent, they don't get a similar percentage of starring roles in books. Card begged to be allowed off the hook, because he's not black, and any attempt that he might make to portray a black character would come up wanting. In the end, however, he went for it. His portrayal of black culture seemed genuine to this pasty white guy anyway. He seemed to have succeeded. I'm sure black people who read the story, however, surely found things that didn't seem quite genuine. Who knows?

But I wonder if the fact that this book was so black-centric was why I didn't like it. It didn't speak to me like many of Card's other works have. Am I a racist? I don't think I am, but I guess there's something to be said about having a book targeted at you. When it's written for a certain piece of the population, like blacks, then they are more likely to enjoy it. I guess Card's friend was right when he said there needs to be more black main characters in fiction. If I were a black man, I might be less inclined to read books, just because the characters never resemble me in any way.

Anyway, I made it through the whole book, but I couldn't really recommend it to anyone. If you want to read a good book by Card, then read Pastwatch, or the original Ender series. Those are some really good books. Magic Street just wasn't fun like I wanted it to be. I guess you can't win them all, and even someone's favorite author doesn't always please. Then again, if you're black, this book might be right up your alley.

Leviathan

I first came to know Scott Westerfeld as I was reading through the list of stories on the Hugo Awards short list...or maybe it was the long list...It was pretty long...anyway, the list of stories that had received votes, but didn't make the final ballot. He had written a story called Ass-hat Magic Spider. I took one look at the title and said, "That's a story for me!" I rushed out and read it right away. It was a great story, and someday, if we ever get some money to pay people with for the podcast, I will make this story one of the first we buy.

So, when I saw a Scott Westerfeld book on my library's shelves, I checked it out right away.

Leviathan is a YA Steampunk novel. It's not just your average, run of the mill Steampunk, however (if there is such a thing for such a new sub-genre). In the world of Leviathan, the powers of Europe have gone in two very distinct technological directions. There's the Clankers, so named because their technology involves metal, steam power, engines, and the like. The nations German speaking nations of Europe seem to be the ones that have invested heavily in this traditional Steampunk technology (if there is such a thing for such a new sub-genre). Then there's the Darwinists. The Darwinists use some form of genetic engineering to create creatures to do the work that machines would do. The Darwinists are what we called the Allies, Britain, France, and Russia (although, Britain is really the only one we discuss in this book, so I'm not sure if France and Russia do the Darwinist thing).

The titular character...I guess you can't really call it a character, but sometimes it seemed to be close...the Leviathan, is the British airship that is made from the combination of a lot of different DNA, a whale being the most obvious. Somehow, these Darwinists have created creatures that, as part of their digestion, fart hydrogen into a giant gas bag. It uses this hydrogen filled bladder, to float through the air, and then the British military outfits it like a Zeppelin.

This part was the most interesting to me. It really got my mind reeling, imagining the possibilities. It makes me want to write a story myself that incorporates these Darwinist creatures.

To the story. It begins as Europe stands on the brink of World War I. We have two main characters in the book, Alek and Deryn. Alek is the son of the Archduke Ferdinand. If you rememeber your history classes from high school, you know that things don't go well for Archduke Ferdinand. At the start of the book, Ferdinand is assassinated, and Alek, with the help of some loyal servants, flees into the night to avoid a similar fate. Deryn is a Scottish girl whose father used to experiment with ballooning. Her father met a tragic accident, and Deryn has missed him greatly. Now, although girls are not allowed, Deryn has decided to join up with the British Air Service. She pretends to be a boy, and manages, with the help of the knowledge that her father bestowed on her, to get accepted into the service.

The two, of course, are on a collision course, although it's hard to see where it will come from, but eventually they meet up. Then the sparks fly. Alek tries to keep the fact that he is the son of the Archduke a secret, and Deryn does the same with the fact that she is a girl.

The book is very interesting, but I have to admit that it didn't hook me completely. It is the first in a trilogy, so nothing was resolved at the end. We'll have to see where it is going as the rest of the volumes come out in the future. I am interested, but I had hoped to be a lot more hooked. Maybe it's because it's set so far in the past in an era that I know relatively little about. Perhaps if it was WW2 rather than WW1 I would have been able to get more immersed in it. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad book at all. It was mindbogglingly cool to read about some of the things Westerfeld invented for this world. But the characters just didn't pull me in completely. I do plan on reading the later books though, so we'll see how that goes.

Up next for me? I came across an Orson Scott Card book that I hadn't read. I have been a pretty big fan of the guy ever since I read Ender's Game for the first time in high school. So my next book is Magic Street. I know nothing about it, so all I can say is I hope it's good.

Overclocked: Stories Of The Future Present

I decided to give Cory Doctorow's volume of short stories called Overclocked: Stories Of The Future Present a chance next. I went through and downloaded the audio versions that I could find of all the stories in this collection. Cory Doctorow is one of those author's that has a conduit into my brain. It almost seems like when he goes to write something, he rubs his lamp, out pops a genie, and he says, "Give me an idea that would really interest Big Anklevich." Then he's off to make something that really appeals to me. I mentioned when I talked about Little Brother just how addicting that novel was. Most anything he's done is the same way for me. Sure there's the few odd ones I don't like--I wasn't a fan of True Names, the story he did with Benjamin Rosenbaum, so I guess he doesn't really ask a genie what I'd like--but they're hard to come by.

Printcrime: This one was done as a flash story on Escape Pod a few years back. I heard it then, and of course am now hearing it again. It's not my favorite Doctorow, it's not bad; I enjoyed it, but it's too short to get too invested in.

Doctorow always hammers on the idea of the government or corporations or the like trying to control what you do, and this is another story in that vein. It centers on the idea of 3D printers being illegal, because people could use them to print things like Gucci handbags and Prada shoes or something. So governments won't allow people to use them. Well, it wouldn't be a story if the hero went along with that now would it?

Before this story, I'd never even heard of 3D printers. This one and Boyfriend by Madeline Ashby (which was on Escape Pod back in September) led me to investigate this whole concept. It wasn't easy to find out what they exactly were. You search printers online and you don't get 3D printers right off, that's for sure.

When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth: I first heard this one on a Podiobooks anthology of stories called Voices: New Media Fiction. This collection brought together stories by authors who were podcasting their own stories. Doctorow started doing his own podcast way back in 2005 or 2006, so he was a pioneer of sorts. I came to the story podcast fold by listening to Escape Pod, which is a very well produced show. Very seldom does a reader screw up on a sentence, and then forget to get that edited out. Doctorow does his podcast in a completely different way. While it's recorded, it's done as if it were live. If he screws up, he goes back and rereads it, but there is no editing involved. After all, editing is very time consuming. I suppose treating it this way is wise for a very busy author like him, but it took me a while to come to terms with it. I was usually pretty irritated, after all I work in the field, and to me it was just monstrously unprofessional. Which makes sense, of course because he is not a professional like I am. I've learned how to forgive and accept it for what it is, after all, I did get it for free, I can't really expect it to sound like things I pay money for.

Anyway, enough about Doctorow's podcast. Let's talk about the story. When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth is about a sysadmin who survives a world ending holocaust by hiding out in his server room with other sysadmins. All the climate control and particulate filtering has made his workplace into the perfect place to ride out a bioagent attack. With the world ended, the sysadmins hiding out in similar places like the one our main character is hiding in decide to elect a prime minister of cyberspace, and write up a constitution that will help the world avoid ever arriving at a juncture like this one in the future.

It doesn't sound all that interesting from my description of it, but believe me it's a really cool story. You'd enjoy reading it or listening to it.

Anda's Game: This is another one that I heard on the Podiobooks collection. It's read by a famous gamer of some sort or other. Not being a gamer, her name means nothing to me, but she does a great job with the story, and that does matter.

Just the other day, we ran the story, Playable Character by Eric Juneau. Anda's Game is very similar to that story to Playable Character in that it's set in a World Of Warcraft style video game, only Anda's Game is much more socially conscious. In a near future, a British school girl learns to see the importance of doing good to others, instead of always satisfying her own selfish urges. It helps her improve her life in more ways than one. Really good story. Very fun and interesting.

I, Robot: This story, Doctorow said, tries to address a flaw in Isaac Asimov's robot mythology. For some reason, there never were competing companies that created robots. It was always U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men. In this story, there's competing entities. There's also giant conglomerate countries with names drawn from Orwell's 1984. And of course there's government agencies run amuck, stealing liberties away from its citizens. In this story, a cop learns just exactly what his country is up to. Again, I enjoyed this story a lot. It's very similar to Little Brother in many ways, so it was guaranteed to be interesting to me.

I, Row-Boat: Is a story about a sentient rowboat. It's set in a very far future, where human beings are no longer anchored to their bodies, but can upload their consciousnesses to wherever they want. Our rowboat hero, Robbie, takes people who have downloaded into bodies provided for them to experience what it was like to be a human scuba diving. Robbie develops romantic feelings for a human that has come diving. And then, some benevolent human consciousness decides to uplift the coral reef that Robbie's divers are exploring. The coral reef is confrontational and angry, and it attacks Robbie's divers. What will Robbie do?

It's a good story. Similar in ways the the aforementioned True Names that Doctorow wrote with Benjamin Rosenbaum. It's a little more accessible, though, I think.

After The Siege: Last story in the bunch. This one was really interesting. It's based on the siege of Leningrad, from World War II. It's set in the future, however, and involves 3D printers again. The people in the city where the story takes place are forced to live through some serious degradations and shortages. It really brings home what war can be like, and how it's always the hardest on those least responsible for it, the weakest and meekest always pay the biggest price.

So, overall, I think this is a great book, and I would recommend you pick it up and check it out. I love short stories (maybe that's why I produce a short story podcast), and these are some top quality short stories.

Up next, I'm taking another detour from my list of classic sci-fi literature, to read Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan. It's that dreaded sub-genre of Steampunk. Can't wait to see what's in store for me.

Fahrenheit 451

When I first started reading this one, I was pretty certain that it was going to be one that I didn't like. It seemed to be more of a 200 page epic poem than a novel to me. Every single thing was talked about as a metaphor or a simile to something else. It seemed like nothing was happening at all in the story, because so much time was taken up with poetic speech.

If you don't know how I feel about poetry, then you should take a look back in the Dunesteef archive, and you'll find that I admit that I really don't like it. It seems to be meaningless froufrou to me. All ornamentation and no substance. But if that was truly the case, wouldn't it have died out and gone away years ago? Yet it continues to persist, despite all of society's disdain.

A guy at work has one of those tear off desk calendars that has a new thing for each day. His is by the parody news site theonion.com. Each day, there's a new fake news article, and they're really very funny and there's a lot of caustic jabs at people's failings. Anyway, the other day, the onion story was about a poet who had just finished his most recent work. After finishing, he took another pass to "obscure up" his poem, removing words that were necessary for it to make sense to normal human beings. The last line of the story said that the poem would be completely ready once his 5 year old nephew wrote the last stanza. That's the kind of disdain poetry gets these days. And I pretty much completely agreed.

Then I read Fahrenheit 451. In that book, society outlaws reading books. Not because some totalitarian Nazi-like hardline government came into power, but because people became too lazy to read anything. They watched TV all the time instead, filling their lives with meaningless chatter in search of fun. And since their minds were so empty, they felt bad when others, who did read, would point out their stupidity. They'd show those snobs, books were outlawed. Firemen didn't put out fires anymore, they started them. They went to the houses of those that hid books, and burned them.

Montag, the book's main character, is a fireman who has a change of heart. He turns from bookburning to a book advocate. There is a particularly powerful scene in the story where Montag forces his wife and two of her friends to listen to a poem from a book he has squirreled away. One of the women is left in tears, another flies into a rage. They cannot handle the words at all.

The scene made me stop and wonder if I haven't been wrong all along. Is poetry more than froufrou? I have said before that I must not be smart enough to understand poetry. But this book gives me a more accurate excuse. It's not that I'm not smart enough to understand it, it's that I'm too lazy. I'm one of those people in the book who chose to fill his life with meaningless chatter in search of fun, instead of trying to grapple with hard subjects. Perhaps someday, someone will come along and take that stuff away, because no one will really mind anyway, right?

What other things will they take away then? What other things are too boring or intellectual to be forced to deal with? What about mathematics? Nobody likes math in school anymore. Will those bright kids from other countries be the only ones that understand math in the future? Will the western world sink back into poverty because they were too lazy and bored to learn about math or science? What else will go, I wonder.

As you can see, it's a very thought provoking book. It's interesting too, because the plot in the book is really only enough to make into a short story. But, Bradbury goes out of his way to make every line sound poetic. Supposedly, that hammers home his point. It worked for me, I think I got the point...or at least one of his points. I'm still not interested in poetry, unfortunately, but I have been making an effort to read more and more recently, so I don't think I'm totally lost.

Anyhow, up next: Cory Doctorow's short story collection Overclocked: Stories Of The Future Present. I've read a few of Doctorow's short stories and I've enjoyed them. I also really liked Little Brother, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Artemis Fowl

I went about reading this series all wrong, unfortunately. I was at my podunk local library, and I found book 2 in the audiobook section, as well as book four. So I grabbed them, and listened. They were pretty good. I couldn't get a hold of book 1, but I did get book 3, so I managed to fill in the hole between book 2 and 4.

I kept trying, and still couldn't get book 1. The library had it, and it wasn't even checked out, but they couldn't locate it. So when I would try to request it, they would just cancel my holds. I did manage to get book 5 though, the further adventures. Book 1 was nowhere to be found though, and after trying a few more times, I finally gave up on ever getting that audiobook from my library.

A year and a half go by, and I find myself back in the library, and lo, and behold, there it is, just sitting there on the shelf! They've found the first Artemis Fowl audiobook, and put it back on the shelf for me. So, I grabbed it, of course.

Artemis Fowl is YA fiction. It's fantasy/scifi. And, like Harry Potter, or many other YA fiction series that have come out in recent years, it's pure fun. It's candy for someone like me who has been spending his time listening to heavy, meat and potatoes-like books like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Neuromancer. It's really fun stuff.

But don't take my candy comment wrong. It's not like Artemis Fowl is fluff with no substance at all. Eoin Colfer put in a lot of work crafting a fine story with well-rounded characters, touching moments, a nice character arc for our main man Artemis, an extremely interesting world, and gripping plot. I think I've heard it described somewhere as a cross between James Bond and Harry Potter, and that's a pretty good description.

On top of the high quality of the book itself was the very high quality of the narrator. Nathaniel Parker, he who played our lead character in the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, really impressed me with his range of voices. Each character was interesting and unique, although his American accents sounded a little lame, but they surely couldn't have sounded as bad as my English accents, so I can't fault him.

All in all, I recommend that you spend a few commutes enjoying an Artemis Fowl audiobook. Both the book and the reading won't fail to entertain you.

Next up for me? Back to the grindstone, it's time for Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury classic.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Rock Hudson famously stormed out of a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, muttering "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?"

When I first saw the film in college I had a similar, but slightly different experience. I famously dozed off in the third act, snoring away in the college library. But if someone had invented a translator that took snores and fashioned them into words, it would have said, "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?"

I only sort of got it. Maybe if I'd managed to stay awake I would have understood better. When it came time to write my paper on the subject, I had to search the internet for other people's opinions about the film. I knew it had something to do with evolution, but it was such a stretch for me to figure out.

So I approached the reading of Arthur C. Clarke's book with a lot of wariness. I needn't have worried. This is an interesting book, and for those of you who despised the film like I did, it will transform your experience into something much more palatable.

The book, a commemorative edition published in time for the actual year of 2001, started with a prologue by Arthur C. Clarke. He recalls the writing of the book, which, I didn't realize, was written in conjunction with Stanley Kubrick as the film was being made. It wasn't done in the usual fashion of screen adaptations where an already produced text is adapted for the screen. Because of this, there are several variations between the book and the film, but all in all it's pretty much the same story.

The difference between the two is that the book actually explains things with exposition and dialogue and all that fun stuff, where the film just shows a picture of someone's face and plays classical music, and leaves you in the dark as to what was actually going on.

Now I admit, I'm not particularly intelligent. I'm not a boorish moron, but I'm not the smartest guy either. I've already related some of what I thought about the book to a friend at work, and he voiced the opinion that I was in fact stupid, and the film was completely clear and understandable to him. So maybe the rest of you reading this (as if anyone was) agree with him, and can't stand my simpleton stumblings. I'll be the first to admit that I'm surely an idiot.

But, if you are an idiot like me, and didn't get the film at all, check out the book. It's a pretty good read. Most of the story is vastly more interesting when there is a little more given to you to work with.

For example, I wanted to pull my hair out during the sequence that involved the man-apes and their prehistoric struggle to evolve. It was awful to sit through. In the book, however, it was my favorite part. I could probably have read an entire book about the man-apes and been satisfied with that.

The other parts are much more interesting as well. From the trip to Jupiter (which is actually to Saturn in the book, they bailed on Saturn in the film because the special effects crew couldn't make decent looking rings), to HAL9000's descent into madness, to (most of all) the end sequence where Dave Bowman takes his step forward in evolution, there is so much more to be understood and enjoyed.

Now, it's not a perfect book for sure. As is the way with many of the Sci-fi grand masters, there's a lot of slow moving sections where the story stops to discuss, analyze, and postulate on the science, or worse, to explain in exhaustive detail how some invention of theirs is supposed to work. But for the most part, it's a lot of fun, and it really served me well by taking a classic masterpiece in film, and making it accessible to me at last.

Up next: Well, I take a step in a different direction. I'm going to read Eoin Colfer's YA novel Artemis Fowl. Sometimes it's nice to eat dessert along with all those meat and potatoes.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I really enjoyed this one. I've become a bit of a connoisseur (is that the right word, probably not since I think it implies that I know a little something about it, which I don't) of juvenile and young adult fiction. It's got a lot to do with the fact that my kids have reached that age, and it also has a lot to do with the fact that juvenile and young adult fiction seems to be the stuff that is exploding the most in the consciousness of the public these days, probably due mostly to Harry Potter's eye opening success.

Recently, though, I've read a fair amount of juvenile and young adult fiction. I read to my kids when I put them to bed as often as I can manage, which sadly is something like once every two weeks or less. I've been getting the opportunity to read books that I never got around to reading myself when I was a kid. I never read a full novel until I was about fourteen or so, so I missed a lot of good stuff. Right now, me and the kids are working our way through The Mouse And The Motorcycle.

I listened to The Graveyard Book with the thought of whether my kids would like it or not. Writing a book for kids that's about ghosts, ghouls, witches and killers is asking for it really. My kids are a timid sort, but they're not alone in that category. There's a lot of scaredy-cat kids out there. I once thought my oldest son was a bit of a wimp, but I've met some serious, no holds barred wimps in my days as a dad, which have made me realize that my son is not as bad as I once thought.

The Graveyard Book has scary parts, but if you can handle a Harry Potter novel, then you can handle The Graveyard Book. It was enjoyable for me, from beginning to end. Like many juvenile books, it was more like a collection of short stories about the same character than an actual novel. We follow the adventures of Nobody Owens as he is raised by the denizens of a graveyard. The short story-like chapters, follow Bod, as he likes to be called, from childhood to almost adulthood. It's a very different format than what you get from most adult novels, but I liked it all the same.

My only gripes were these...(by the way, if you haven't read the book, I'd skip the gripes, because they are spoiler-ific, but I had to say them, when I say, "END OF SPOILERS" it's safe to read again).

1. Bod's ghost parents are just not important characters in the book. They aren't involved in much of anything. It was all about his guardian, Silas. When the end came, and Bod said goodbye to his mother in a scene that was supposed to be touching, it felt completely hollow to me. Who was this woman? His mother? I don't remember hearing much about her the whole book through. I felt about as much when Optimus Prime mourned the death of Jazz in the first Transformers crap-stravaganza.

2. I was very disappointed with the way Scarlett was written out of the book. After meeting her as a five-year old, and then bringing her back as a teenager, she suddenly and unceremoniously runs out, moves back to Glasgow and that's that. It was not at all satisfying. It would have been better not to bring her back at all, instead introducing some new female to play her part in the second part.

END OF SPOILERS

It's safe to read again, but I don't really have much more to say. I recommend this book. I liked it even better than the last Hugo-winning Neil Gaiman novel I read. Even adults, who aren't necessarily its target audience, would enjoy this book. So if you haven't read it yet, check it out. Get the audio book, by the way, Neil Gaiman reads it himself, and of all the author's I've ever heard reading their work, he is by far, and I really mean by far, the best. He gives professional audio book readers a run for their money.

Up next? Back to the hard SF. Arthur C. Clark's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hope this is better than the film, or you may never hear my review of it, because I will have fallen asleep at the wheel of my car, crashed, and died. I fell asleep two separate times trying to watch the film, luckily I was parked on a couch for that.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

When I was younger, I put so much stock into things that I had discovered first. If everybody knew about it, then it was no longer cool.

When I got a little older, I gave up on that preconception though. It's not true. Take Harry Potter for example. I know many people who hate Harry Potter even though they've never spent a minute reading one of the novels, just because of the sensation it caused. They don't know what they're missing. Those books are really good, even though everybody likes them.

Of course, someday, years from now, they'll seem tired. People will experience the whole series by the movies without ever reading a paragraph. And so on. There is that drawback. If everybody knows about it, then it permeates our culture, and becomes one of those things that you know without actually experiencing it. Like the writings of Shakespeare have become. Any idea how many of the common turns of phrase that people use on a daily basis are lifted from the pages of Shakespearean plays? A lot...check out this site for proof.

That's the problem that I ran into with The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It's been around a long time, about as long as I have. Growing up, I've heard more and more about how this book goes. Culminating in the film version from a few years ago, where I learned about most of the little parts I hadn't already heard. So when I finally took up the book, it was too late for anything in it to feel fresh and interesting. I still liked it, but it wasn't the experience I was hoping for.

Usually, when you hear about something for so long, it's amazing to finally experience it for yourself. Like my experience with reading Frank Herbert's Dune for the first time. What I knew of it was widened out and expanded. That wasn't the case with The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy though. It wasn't a complement to the movie...it was merely another telling. Which made me sad.

I think the problem might have been the fact that it was comedy. Retelling jokes doesn't tend to make them funnier, instead they get less funny. The punchline can't surprise you any more once you've heard it.

It's too bad. I still recommend the book to anyone, because it's fun, and, hey, it's really short too. And maybe you haven't had the whole thing spoiled for you like I had. It is a good book. And for a comedy to still be gaining fans 30 years later really says something about its quality.

Anyway, next up for me: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. That's one that I know almost nothing about...

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

My first introduction to Little Brother was on StarShipSofa. Back in May of last year, Tony played a 30 minute sample of the book. I got to hear the start of a young super-hacker's adventure. He snuck out of his heavily surveilled school, fooling gait-cams, arphids, and brown-nosing snitches to do it. It was fun, and enjoyable. I never expected what was to come.

Our hero, Marcus, and his friends are out of school, trying to play an internet game that involves doing things in the real world as well as online. Suddenly, a terrorist attack occurs, and while trying to get help, our main characters instead get arrested by the Department of Homeland Security. This is where the story takes a sharp left turn and changes from what I had expected it to be, judging by the preview StarShipSofa provided, to what the story really was about.

There are some really difficult moments to read in this book, including several incidents of state sponsored torture, but it is all well worth it. This book was absolutely terrific. Anyone who reads more than a book a year or so knows the feeling when you get into a novel, and all you want to do is keep reading. It gets late at night, and you have to be at school or work early the next morning, but you can't bring yourself to put the book down. Your house is an utter disaster, and you really should be cleaning up, getting your kids dressed, changing the baby's diaper, but instead all you want to do is read more in the story. My wife is particularly susceptible to this disease. She tends to finish books in a day or less, because once she pops, she can't stop.

Well, I'm not so susceptible as that, but it happens on occasion, and with this book, it hit me hard. All I wanted to do was read...or listen anyway. I had the audio version of the book, read by Kirby Heybourne (why, by the way was a great pick for a reader. He was a completely believable 17 year-old. I'm sure that might be a drawback if he's reading other books, but perfect for this story). It's harder to be addicted to a book when you have to listen to it. Well, maybe that's not true. You can take care of a lot of those chores that you might have to ignore if you had to read the book with your eyes. I could mow the lawn and read at the same time...how talented am I? But when you're addicted to a book, and you're listening to it, you can't go any faster to find out what happens next like you can when you read.

Anyway, after several nights of less sleep than I needed, I finished this book. It only took me a matter of days. And I recommend it to anyone. It's a fun read, but beyond that, it opens your eyes to a lot of things that you've probably never considered. I hadn't. Wandering aimlessly through my suburban life, I never considered the impact of surveillance, of spying on our own people, and what it might lead to. I have been concerned with what rights we might have given up in the name of security, and this story is all about that kind of stuff. Check it out and enjoy.

Up next for me? The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It's a short one, so I should be back soon with another report.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

I didn't know thing one about this book going into it. It shows just what a noob I really am when it comes to science fiction, or at least to certain corners and alcoves of the science fiction pad. I would have approached it with more trepidation had I known. When I told Rish what I was reading next he said, "Oh, you couldn't pay me to read Gibson." But I looked at the list that Liz Mierzejewski put on her comment post, and saw that Neuromancer was number 10, and it was also specifically mentioned on Jason Sanford's story, Book Scouts Of The Galactic Rim, and I went ahead and gave it a shot.

I didn't know that the story was a cyberpunk story though. Cyberpunk is a genre that I have a really, really hard time with. I struggle with any science fiction story that uses a lot of specialized jargon, and you can get that in any sub-genre, but with cyberpunk, it's almost mandated. I have to admit that for long periods of time in the story, I had only the loosest grip on what was going on. If I hadn't mentioned on the blog that I was going to be reading it next, I probably would have quit on it. But I bravely soldiered on, and by the end...I still didn't like it much.

I never did figure out what most of the slang and BS in the story meant. What are microsofts? They're not related to the company of the same name, which hadn't even released its first version of Windows by the time this book was published. What is an Ono-Sendai? I think I finally figured out that it is the brand of computer he was using, but I could have been wrong. He mentioned the Yakuza a lot, and I think I finally figured out that he was talking about the Japanese mafia, but I don't think he ever helped me to figure that out--I may have looked it up on Wikipedia or something like that, I can't remember. And I still don't know what Flatlining is. People were said to be flatlining, which I would assume meant to die, but there was the flatline construct as well. And then there was the frequently mentioned Hosaka, and the place called Freeside, which I didn't figure out for a long while was actually a space station not a city on a Caribbean island or something. A lot of it I still wouldn't get, but I just found a sort of glossary that someone has compiled over at Wikipedia.

One other thing that I really despise is stories about drug addicts. Maybe if it was a story about someone who had kicked drugs, and was doing their best to stay off the stuff, but I just don't care what an effed up drug addict is doing to score their next hit. I don't think that Pulp Fiction is an awesome movie, I couldn't make it through Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, and I didn't enjoy my attempt at reading Naked Lunch. Case was a drug addict who did take some left turns in search of drugs, but not enough to completely sour me on the story, it was just mildly annoying and stupid.

One of my big problems may have been the fact that I listened to this book in audio rather than reading a print version. With material like this, it can be infinitely valuable to be able to flip back a page or two, or a chapter or two, to reread a part that will ease your confusion about the part your reading now. But with audio, you just can't do that. I wonder if I would have liked Dune as much as I did if I'd listened to the audio rather than reading the actual book? I tried to listen to the Dune sequel, and couldn't get past the first tape, but that could have been the severely annoying voice that the reader had more than the material itself.

Anyway, if you haven't figured it out already, this book was not for me. I suppose it's a classic, the first cyberpunk novel or at least the first big one, but cyberpunk just isn't really my thing. To make cyberpunk work for me, a lot has to be done to soften the landing. Others, I'm sure, love it, and that's okay, we're all different, and I'm glad we are. It makes life so much richer.

I'm happy to be moving on. Up next...Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's not on the classic list, but it was a Hugo nominee this year, so I figure it's worthy. I hope there's no cyberpunk in it...

American Gods

A few weeks ago, Rish and I ran Book Scouts Of The Galactic Rim by Jason Sanford on the podcast. If you haven't heard it yet, it's a story that talks a lot about various seminal science fiction works. The story got the both of us thinking. We did mention the fact that we both felt lacking in our knowledge of science fiction literature. Independently, without ever conversing about it, we both decided to start working on remedying that fault.

I happened over to Rish's blog, and saw that he'd posted about his first venture. He's reading Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land. That's one of the few books that I already have read, and I must admit that it wasn't my favorite. It was hard to get through, but I struggled away, and made it to the end. I never felt rewarded for my persistence though. I had recently finished reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which I loved, so I was hoping for more of the same with Stranger. It's not what I got, for sure. Okay, I'll further admit, not only was it not my favorite, I hated it. But you can't always win, it's just life. I just hope that Rish doesn't feel quite the same way as I did, because it could easily damage his resolve to continue.

My reading time is so very limited these days, but my listening time isn't. So I went in search of Audio Books. I wanted to hear Neuromancer by William Gibson, a book that Jason Sanford referred to in his story. While I searched for that, I got Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a book that won a Hugo Award a few years ago. It isn't classic science fiction, but as a Hugo winner, it likely will be someday.I really enjoyed the book. Gaiman has a very readable (or maybe I should say listenable) style of writing. And his story was very fun. I heard it described somewhere as a cross between Americana, Fantasy, and Myth. I really liked the combination. Sometimes it seemed like it could have been Garrison Keillor writing about the residents of Lake Wobegon, except that those residents were Ibis of Egyptian mythology or Odin of Norse mythology or Kali of Indian mythology.

I have to admit that, like most Americans, I have little to no knowledge of the mythos of gods that don't belong to the Greek pantheon. They teach Greek mythology in public schools, and, even though there's a great deal of time spent in history class discussing Egypt, their mythology is not heavily explained. Go beyond that, and there's no time spent whatsoever on myth. Not the Norse gods, Indian gods, African gods, or Mayan gods. If you want to know a little or a lot about those pantheons, then you've got to seek it out on your own. Neil Gaiman must have spent a few lifetimes researching for this book. He refers to so many different gods from so many different places, that it leaves an ignoramus like me feeling dumb...but entertained all the same.

One thing, which was probably a wise move, that I found interesting was the almost complete lack of mention that we got of the Judeo-Christian pantheon. There was a small mention, but it was probably better to just leave it out and save himself the trouble it could create. Besides, in America Jesus is just too powerful. He didn't fit into the story about old, forgotten gods at all.

I was led by curiosity to see if there was a site out there somewhere that gives some sort of glossary for us dummies that just don't know mythology like an intelligent guy like Gaiman does. The book in several places gives you only a description of one god or another, and I was just so curious that I had to find out exactly who they were. If you're the same as me, check out frowl.org, but wait until you are finished reading, because some of the entries contain spoilers that might blow some of the surprises that the book has in store for you.

My only complaint about the book (and it's just because I'm a sad old prude) was that I could have done without the various graphic descriptions of sexual encounters. These were mostly found in the "Coming To America" segments, that were interspersed throughout the book. I think the book would have been fine without them, but I'm a prude. Oh well. I got through the book just fine, and they weren't enough to scare me off or take away from my enjoyment of the book, but depending on your level of prudishness, they could be.

Up next, Gibson's Neuromancer!