Another Libary [sic] Book

I gave up on Bear’s Anvil of Stars after a few tens of pages a few years ago and decided recently to give it another try. Now I haven’t enough superlatives to describe it.  The author cleverly inverts the weekly Star Trek first-contact story in a way that I’ve never seen before.  [To explain would be an injustice to any perspective reader.]  To his heroes, space travel is an unwanted adventure, and the evil marauders are the most sympathetically drawn characters. He even manages to cook up an extraterrestrial mathematics I found interesting, integer-free reckoning [how?].  I liked that the alien weapons start out impressively and grow more impressive still, stopping just short of the ridiculous.  (The effect on the reader is a bit like giving someone the boxed set and then springing Clan tech on them after a few games.)

Anvil of Stars is the sequel to a novel in which Earth is destroyed and is a better story than its predecessor.  Bear needs to get the Earth out of the way before he can really get warmed up, it seems.  He did the same with Eon and Eternity, and here too the latter is the better book.

Less Than Zero

Was Bob Wright always this tedious?  I had taken a brief holiday from listening to Bloggingheads which I may well make permanent.  Bob’s Walt Disney “Tomorrowland” Utopianism has passed from amusing to tiresome.  More likely that my great-grandchildren will spend their leisure hours hacking to death with machete their neighbors from the village over the hill, machete being the highest technology available.

Envy Me!

Or simply wish me well.  I spent my evening watching a nature video and eating a homemade spicy rice dish, and I’m about to curl up with a book and turn in early.  It’s what I’ve been looking forward to all week.

As They, So We

I know it’s not an original observation, but it does amuse that the way denizens of the BattleTech universe covet and keep LosTech hardware and Star League memory cores parallels so exactly the way that fans collect old books and out-of-print figures.

Grandma was right

…about this and this.

Times Up!

I wonder if this explains this. [Warning!  Potentially prurient.]

What a Long, Strange Trip (Long)

A friend called to ask if I wanted to try his new Star Trek game, and I said yes.  I knew Star Trek as the show that came on Saturday afternoons in the summer on the UHF channel–these were the days before Fox, UPN and WB.  The game itself was a bit of a snoozer, but I found myself admiring the ads for other games printed inside the box.  “What’s Battle-Tech?” I wondered.

It would be a while before I found out.  A few grades later a different friend somehow acquired a sum of money and resolved to spend it irresponsibly.  After viewing (at his insistence) a dozen scale models of Star Trek space ships, I remarked aloud that there was a board game wherein he could pit the ships against each other.  A few days later he was at my door with an open box insisting that I teach him to play.  I put into his head that he should try some of the other games produced by FASA, and sure enough a box of the 2nd ed. game was forthcoming.  What a relief it was to be able to spend five minutes with this guy and not hear “shields” or “dilithium!”

Soon enough I had my own box.  I went halfsies with a neighbor on the 3rd ed. and we set about painting the figures.  For a while we couldn’t play the game because he took the dice to school and got them confiscated.  (Why take dice to school?  For a floating craps game.  Yes, like in Guys and Dolls.)  Eventually he went to reform school without his half of the game, which I kept entirely.

In college I didn’t play at all.  There was a games club, but there was too much overlap in membership with the S&M club.  (I wish I were kidding.)  I didn’t return to the fold until I discovered quite by accident an Internet site where some oddballs were discussing heat sinks, JumpShips, and something called the Word of Blake which I didn’t even remember.

I don’t know how this story will end, but I now seem to have a doppelgänger in the intelligence services of one of the Great Houses.  I’m even on familiar terms with some of the folk who are in charge of the game.  It would not even have occurred to me to wish for any of this all those years ago when I first learned the word “actuator.”  Suck it, Trek fans.

Ugly Times

The Times makes space for one of the guys Leslie Nielsen beat up in the first five minutes of The Naked Gun.  Whenever I hear a dew-eyed soliloquy about the people of Palestine coming together under a united state, I think of Sarah Silverman: “If we can put a man on the moon, then we can put a man with AIDS on the moon.  And then some day, we can put every man with AIDS on the moon.”

Silly Times

 

Funny place names on a slow news day.

It’s Not Over

It isn’t even the end of the beginning.  From the UK Times:

Iceland, Bulgaria, Latvia: these are not natural protest cultures. Something is going amiss.

Ukraine could be the next to go. The gas pricing deal agreed with Moscow could propel the country towards a serious financial crisis. Russia, too, is looking wobbly. A riot in Vladivostok may have been an omen for things to come. What will happen when the wider economic crisis translates into higher food prices? Or if Gazprom has no choice but to increase domestic gas prices?

The world that emerges from the current goings-on may not much resemble the one we remember.  Enjoy every sandwich, my friends.