Strictly Week 11, plus other telly.

Sorry for the lack of posts. We are currently in the middle of a major roof-and-windows replacement which has become a bit of a nightmare. I still have internet, but it's all a bit disheartening. I've been sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs for a week, and it looks like it'll be another week before I can get back into my bedroom.

The other problem is that the current contestents on Strictly seem all a bit... bland. Thank god for Austin and Erin's paso, which had some energy to it! Everyone else is good, but a bit dull; Arlene really shouldn't have tried to compared Rachel to Alesha, because, basically, hell no. Alesha was exciting and energetic, she had such presence on the dance floor, and no one this series is living up to that consistantly. There have been a couple of dances that did, but largely I think there is a lack of engery and excitment. I did enjoy Lisa and Brendan's dances, Brendan has had a fairly massive change of attitude this year and I'm starting to (gulp) almost like him. Almost.

Anyway.

Last night I watched new comedy show "Beehive." Which was possibly the weirdest tv show in a long time. I enjoyed it, for the most part (minus the vomiting section,) but it wasn't exactly laugh out loud stuff. I liked the parts were they were being themselves, rather than dressed up. The first sex in the city sketch was good, the second one had vomiting, and I think anymore are going to get less funny over time. I laughed at the spiderman bit. So, enjoyable if not exactly funny, and I will probably try and remember to watch again.

I've also been rewatching series 1 and 2 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and being amused-slash-horrified that a)Star Trek manages to illustrate moral ambiguity with more subtley than any current TV shows I watch. (Seriously Star Trek. WTF?) and b) that a generation are growing up thinking that NewWho is how you write scifi. In twenty years time we are either going to have awful scifi shows written by children who watching Doctor Who and write like that, or we are going to have good scifi shows written by children who watching NewWho and went I can write better than that.

Fingers crossed.

(This is probably the one and only mention NewWho will get on this blog.)

A Collection of Sequels

I haven't read much recently. It's a bit of a pain, as my to-read pile has become a bookshelf full. Unfortuantely I got a bit stuck in my last book, which was the sequel to Rendevouz with Rama, cleverly entitled Rama II.

Sadly, I was not as captured by it as I was by the first book. It didn't help that large sections of the first part were written in a 'future history' style which is either brilliant or awful, in my opinion. I loved Last and First Men, (Olaf Stapledon,) which an entire book of future history. This time I haven't been enjoying it. It probably hasn't helped that it is following a time in our future history where, following a global boom, the global financial system crashes and collapses, leading to nearly a centuries worth of famine, death, disease, etc etc before mankind gets things sorted. It's a bit close to home. (Though at least they had colonised other planets by this time.)

Anyway, I have three more lots of sequels to read now. First I have the the third in the Heechee series by Fredrik Pohl. The first book, Gateway is one of my favourite books, and I was thrilled to discover there was a series. I enjoyed the second book, so I have high hopes for Heechee Rendezvous. (I'm doing alot of rendezvouing of late, it seems.)

Then, I have the third in Scott Orson Card's Ender series, Xenocide. Again, I loved Ender's Game, and I enjoyed the sequel, so I am looking forward to this one.

Then, I bought an entire series of books, in a bit of a mad moment. But I have a young adult book by John Marsden that I have owned since I was about 14, called Tomorrow When the War Began. It's about a group of teenagers who go camping in the wildness for a week and come home to find their country has been invaded. It ends with quite the cliffhanger and I have been waiting ten years to find out what happens. I think they were only published in Australia and America, and by the time I got to amazon they were all out of print. But they have been reprinted and now I have them all.

If I could only stumble across the third book of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series my life would be complete...

Book: The Other Side of the Sky, Arthur C Clarke

This is a collection of short stories, and some of them are very short. Unusually I loved every one of them. Completely unique, suprising ideas. Lots of twists at the end. And humor! I'd forgotten how much I loved sci-fi humor. Many years ago a bought a big collection of humourous sci-fi stories, poems and cartoons entitled Laughing Space in some charity shop somewhere, and it's one of favourite books to dip in and out of. Much of Clarke's stories have a humours slant, usually because humans are small, silly insignificant creatures and the universe is big and unpredicatable and awesome.

It's also many me think about my nano novel, which is scifi. Clarke can do alot of worldbuilding in a short story, and I need to think about how I'm going to do that in my novel. My worldbuilding has been very thin on the ground, despite me spending a long time ironing out the details of my settings.

Star Trek: Voyager (1x01)

Quick quiz! You have crashed on a planet, with one other starfleet officer. You come face to face with three aliens. You warn them that you will shoot if they don't back off, but they shoot at the other officer, injuring him. Do you:

a) shoot the aliens
b) warn them again that you will shoot them if they don't back off
c) turn around to check on the injured officer, thus turning your back on the still-armed aliens who have proven themselves to be hostile?

What the hell Janeway? NO REALLY. Less rubbish, more awesome please.

In her defense it turned out to be a near-death experience type hallucination with an alien who was trying to convince her concisceness to enter his "matrix" so he could feed off it. Or something. Probably it wasn't an entirely accurate portryal of how she would actually act.

Yes, I accidently caught an episode of Star Trek Voyager on Virgin1 last night. So today I decided to watching the pilot again. It's been a long time.

And I really enjoyed it! Chakotay isn't unbearably annoying yet, nor is Neelix. In fact, I rather liked the Neelix/Tuvok interaction at this point.

"Perhaps you'd like a bath?"
"A what?"

Though the way Neelix talks to Kes is still insanely patronising and unbearable. Kes isn't exactly a shining beacon of characteristation though.

The Harry/Tom relationship is good here too - Tom just manages to be both sympathetic and arrogant without going too far in either direction. B'Elanna's at her most angry-with-the-whole-universe, and it's nice to see her calm down as the series progresses.

Janeway is suitable awesome. "It's not crunch time yet Mr. Kim. I'll tell you when."

"Captain, There's something out there."
"I need a better description than that Mr Kim!

She's completely in charge, no questions asked. I love the scenes between her and Tuvok, they have a lovely friendship.

(There are plot holes you could drive a starship through, of course. Did they really only have two medical staff aboard? Who looked after the crew when they were off-duty? I suppose they only thought they would be gone a couple of weeks, but still, they were heading into a potentially dangerous situation that might require a medical team.)

Book: Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke.

Today I have read two books. TWO! I have gone through several weeks lately of not reading at all, except for comfort re-reading, so two books in a day seems a bit excessive. I read one book, and then I was planning to go to the cinema, but there was nothing on I wanted to see. So I read another book.

Anyway, the first book. This is not a review, I'm not good at those. This is just a list of things I love.

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke.

This book was published in 1974, and the back of it informs me that it cost 50p. Also, it was not for sale in Canada, and the Australia price of 1.50 was recommended but not obligatory. I love getting bookmooch books.

Arthur C Clarke is one of the giants in sci-fi writing, and I haven't read nearly as enough of his books as I would like. In fact, I've just mooched the sequel to this book and a couple of others by him.

Rendezvous with Rama is about set in 2131, when we have colonised other planets/moons in the solar system, but not gotten much further than that. We are also a bit obsessed with charting the paths of asteriods after one destroyed most of Italy a while back. The scientists discover a new, large asteriod, so large it is assigned a name instead of a number: Rama. (They've run out of Greek and Roman gods, so started using Hindu mythology.) Except upon closer inspection, it's discovered to be a long metal hollow cylinder, heading towards the sun. The nearest spacecraft is sent to investigate it before it swings around the sun and head back off into deep space.


I love this book. I love that the main drive of the plot doesn't come from the characters endangering themselves and other by making stupid or self-centred decsions, until you want to scream that they should never have let anyone that stupid and blind into space, goddamnit. This is a book all about the mysteries of Rama and the alien races who built it. Each chapter seems to slowly reveal more and more without there being many answers. There are a few, but no one seems to agree on anything. The crew exploring just happened to be the nearest ship, so none of them are terribly training for this, but they are doing the best they can, because they know it is important.

I love that the captain is obsessed with James Cook, and how it constantly affects his decisions - he's very aware that history will remember him, but he's willing to take risks to explore. I love that he trusts his crew to get on with things - like I said, there are no loose cannons on his ship.

I love how thought out and real the universe it's set in feels; the colonies and the United Planets and the irritating politicians and scientists. The delay in communications. The failing attempts to lower the population of earth, that is mostly a half-hearted joke to people.

I love the hints at what the aliens and alien culture we get, just enough to start forming ideas, but nothing very solid of concrete (much like in one of my other favourite books, Gateway.)

And I love the ending. (Highlight to read spoilers.) I love that everyone was so worried Rama would bring alien invaders or attack us or generally be bad, and Rama just wanted to refuel, and then moved on and didn't even realised we existed.

I am looking forward to reading the sequel(s?)