NatCon
I have an enormous amount to say about Convergence 2, and I’m not going to say it now. It needs to sit in my head for a while, and ferment. And brew a little. And… digest… and other appropriate bodily verbs. Basically I need to get around it, my very first convention. It was a bit overwhelming. But the best bit was meeting people, of course – my lastshortstory buddies, and others whom I didn’t know from a bottle of disinfectant beforehand, and now will certainly be keeping in contact with. Incredible what three and a half intense days will do, plus a shared love of scifi and fantasy.
So stay tuned. Ruminations on the con, and the nature of good and evil, to come….
Doctor Who
I just saw an ad for Torchwood, which will be on Channel Ten… and a little while ago, I saw an ad for Doctor Who, on the ABC. It’s going to be a weird, weird season of TV.
Very weird.
But hey, on the flipside, being on Channel Ten might make it cooler for the young ‘uns and spark a revival/discovery of interest in Who. Which can only be good.
Movies I am looking forward to
Ocean’s Thirteen. woohoo!! I loved Eleven, thought Twelve was a bit average although it had a brilliant soundtrack – it let itself down – and, from the ad I just saw, it looks like Thirteen is going to go back to being smart-ass, sassy and very clever. I really hope so.
Die Hard 4.0. Oh. My. Goodness. A fourth?! Is Bruce Willis out of money? Hopefully, this will learn the lesson of Lethal Weapon 4, and be aware of the fact that its protagonist is too old for this sort of shit, and make jokes about that. But, seriously – more Die Hard?! It can only be good!!
Transformers. Hurry up already.
Shrek the Third. J hasn’t even seen the first yet. Bad; very bad. I really, really hope it’s as good as the first two… this is the sort of series that could very easily do a belly flop, though.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Looks very dark and very good. And I can’t wait for the last one to get published, so I can hurry up and read them….
Not Bridge to Terebithia. Boo hiss. Travesty of a marvellous book. More boos and hisses.
Not Nancy Drew, either. Gosh they were bad – although I loved them as a teenager (although Trixie Belden was better…). I read one at age 19 or so and just laughed myself silly. And then just recently I found out that they were syndicated – not written by the same person! (And same deal for Babysitters’ Club!). Oh the shock, the horror.
Stargate Atlantis
Oh. My. Goodness.
Henry Winkler! On Atlantis! Playing some sort of Tommy Lee Jones Under Siege mercenary character.
Totally cool.
Stargate Atlantis
Having finished SG-1, we decided that we’d give Atlantis a go – having ‘met’ the cast in one or two of the SG episodes, and because we needed our fix. We’ve got so used to having TV shows to watch on DVD – SG, West Wing, Firefly… and J isn’t a fan of FarScape, so we thought: why not? And weve just signed on for Bigpond movies, so we made this our first request. The first four disks turned up within a few days, and voila – away we go.
I like Major Sheppard; he is going to be very entertaining. Certainly in the tradition of Jack O’Neill, but different enough that it’s not annoying. Rodney is definitely going to get on my nerves, and I’ve just realised who Dr Weir reminds me of: Janeway. And that is not a good association, as far as I am concerned. I was wondering early on whether they’d get their very own pet alien, as with SG1, and at the moment it looks like that will be Teyla – although I think IMDB says she’s only in a few episodes. Which is good, because I’m getting a bit sick of her shoulders-back-boobs-out posing.
So far, Atlantis is great – after three episodes. It’s also different enough, so far, from SG1 that it doesn’t just feel like a rehash of the same old stuff. It’s a lot more alien, which makes sense since the whole place is alien. I’m looking forward to watching the rest of it.
StarGate
I have, in the past, mentioned how uncomfortable I am about being the over-enthusiastic fan. Nonetheless, having just finished Stargate SG-1 season 10…
The last season was mostly brilliant. The 200th episode was hilarious: a revisit to Wormhole Xtreme!, which makes a lot of sense – the team being asked for their input into a telemovie. This enitre episode was an homage to the rest of the show, as well as a few others. There’s a comment about how weird it is to make a movie from a show that only lasted a few episodes, and T’ealc says there was a lot of interest on DVD… hello, Firefly! But my absolutely favouritest reference, which nearly made me cry with laughter, was Vala trying to convince the producer to create a new show – basically FarScape. Claudia Black was her own character, but Michael Shanks was Crichton and and Ben Browder was Stark. And the producer makes a quip about how he’s never heard of anything like it… Marvellous.
See what I mean about being a fan?
Anyway, the last episode was pretty cool, too, And my theory is that they knew the show was canned (so sad!!) when they were filming the last one, at least – the very last line is something of a reassurance to fans, I think, that there will be more Stargate, eventually.
I do hope so.
Oh the joy
I have finally found someone else who likes BSG! Hallelujah!
The story goes like this:
Friend happens to find out we have been watching it – not sure how; maybe I confessed I was tired because we were watching it too late at night. He then admits that he got hooked on the first season. But – and here is the tragedy of the story – he doesn’t have broadband and didn’t know that the second season was out on DVD. So you know what he’s been doing?
Oh yes. Reading the scripts.
So I fed his addiction and gave him season 2 – which he watched in the holidays – and then season 3. He just finished season 3 last night, so we were able to have a good old yak about it today. It was so nice to talk to someone else about it!! Somehow talking to the person you watch it with – that is, J – isn’t quite the same as finding someone who has watched it independently.
Year of Reading Dangerously
So I’ve got together with three other people – Alisa Krasnostein, Ben Payne, and Tansy Rayner Roberts – to try and read all the Aussie short stories published in 2007 and most of the overseas ones as well. Woohoo! Go us.
Are we nuts or what?
Thanks to Ben, the community where we will be discussing the very best we will come across is called Not if you were the Last Short Story on Earth, which I’m quite fond of, myself. Come along for the ride! Read good and useful reviews! Watch us crack under the pressure!
Comfort Reading
As escape and for comfort, I pulled Stephen Baxter’s Space off the shelf on the weekend. Gosh it’s good. I’ve always liked scifi, but I think he’s the one who really got me into hard scifi – credit him with my appreciation of Alastair Reynolds, I think. I really must find my copy of Time, the first one written in the Manifold series – someone out there has it – or maybe I should just deal with it and buy another copy. I feel a bit bereft without it.
Galactic North
I finished this a couple of days ago – given it is a set of novellas, it serves as my break from reading about the Chinese Revolution, which book I will also post about at some time – there are some doozies of quotes that I have to share with people.
Anyway, to Galactic North: the latest Alastair Reynolds (although apparently there’s a new novel on the way – hurrah). I am eternally grateful to Kate for getting me to to read short stories, since before she started foisting Urchin stories on me (an example of which can be read here – I do so love the Wild Hunt), I never was much of a fan. This I have since repented, and am doing my part in reading a large stack of Aussie shorts (don’t believe me? Check this out). But back to the point. The first two stories (Great Wall of Mars, and Glacial) of this collection are about Galiana and Clavain, familiar to anyone who has read Revelation Space stories and still fascinating characters for newbies. Representing very different forms of culture and humanity – one a Conjoiner, those humans who exist with what is, crudely, an interweb between them, connecting them irrevocably, the other from a faction implacably opposed to such forms of humanity. They are great stories, and although you can read them as stand-alones, as I said, i think they are best seen as filling in (very nicely) holes from the novels.
Those two stories were probablymy favourites, because they did plug holes. “A Spy in Europa” is excellent, a very clever twisty story; “Weather” looks at both Ultras (space-adapted sailors, basically) and Conjoiners more than usual. “Dilation Sleep” is apparently a very old story, and suitably creepy, although not the most interesting of the set; “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” allows Reynolds’ macabre side out to play. “Nightingale” (took me a while to get the name; it’s the name of a hospital ship) is also quite macabre, and an anti-war gem. Finally, “Galactic North” reminded me a lot of Time, Space, and Origin by Stephen Baxter, for its sheer scope of time and space. It was really, really good, too – picking up on something mentioned in one of the novels, and running with it to what should be a ridiculous extent, and yet… it works.
All in all, a glorious set of stories. And it just makes me want more from the Revelation Space ‘verse.
Randomly Yours, Alex 