Samantha Carter
“Wormhole theory, motorcycle riding, and lock-picking.”
I knew there was a reason why I liked Major Sam, on SG-1.
SG-1
I’m really getting into Jonas Quinn – the character is very entertaining. I still want Daniel back, though.
Jack as a snake-head, though?? Weird. Must have really wanted a holiday….
Stargate
Apparently they’ve canned SG-1 after the end of season 10. This is despite the fact that for the first time since season 4, apparently, they had the actors signed in and finance confirmed…. So maybe they’ll go to a different channel, or maybe – just maybe – it will turn into a movie or two… or possibly it will just remain canned.
Firewall
Well, it started off ok, but seriously, this movie has a really quite boring end. It was disappointing. Paul Bettany was great, but just wasn’t done justice. And three things really annoyed me:
1. The blue screens, while people were driving, were shocking.
2. They could use the interweb while driving. I want that technology, but I am not convinced that it is available yet, or at least not readily available.
3. The car exploded with almost no reason to. Pft.
Simon Green
YAY for Simon Green. Seriously – YAY. I’ve just re-read Blue Moon Rising, and Beyond the Blue Moon. There’s a scene in the latter where there are a number of heroes fighting against overwhelming odds (of course), and I realised that it was really quite a lot like the scenes with Owen Deathstalker et al fighting a bunch of baddies. He really is a big fan of the group fight thing, with all of them bringing individual skills and so on. And Hawk and Fisher have a lot in common with Owen and Hazel. Hmm… I might have to read Deathstalker again… but probably not soon. I don’t think I could stand having to go through that again quite so soon.
Yay for Simon Green.
Alastair Reynolds!!!
I’ve just found out that there are two new Reynolds coming out!! No idea when, but who cares – just knowing is enough to keep me on edge. Yay! One’s a novel, the other is a collection of sort stories – which, thanks to the wonderful Kate, I am now totally fine with.
Definitely something to be looking forward to.
Farscape
The episode I am watching now has Alex Dimitriades in it! How funny! I can’t believe that he is still acting… I wonder how he is making any money. And, classically, he plays a lover.
Earth, Air, Fire… Custard…
New Tom Holt book – woohoo! And that really is the title. One of the partners at JW Wells and Co has created a new dimension, the substance of which bears a remarkable resemblance to, yes, custard. So cool.
I really do like Paul, the lead character in these three Wells books; he is just so normal. I like that he isn’t always expressing amazement at the bizarro things going on around him, because I think that – like him – I would just get to a point where amazement is just boring and you just go “yeh, whatever….”
So basically, it’s a good book. Enertaining, weird, twisty-turny, and just now and again laugh-out-loud-funny.
The Left Hand of Darkness
I have, of course, heard about this book by Ursula Le Guin – it’s up there as a seminal work, really, of early scifi especially. I think it counts as spec fic more than scifi per se, but that’s a bit beside the point. I bought it last weekend and read it over the week.
I have a friend who is a big scifi fan who read the Wizard of Earthsea series and was incredibly disappointed – actually, I think he only read the first one and didn’t bother with the others. I may have mentioned this before; to me, Le Guin and some of those other early writers are doing line sketches, whereas a lot of the stuff coming out these days is oil colours – whether they’re consciously thinking about it or not, I think they’re heavily movie-influenced, and writing for a grander and more detailed vision than the earlier writers. Now, I’m perfectly ready to be wrong about that, but it sounds good.
The Left Hand of Darkness is named for a poem of the planet Gethen, where it’s set – light is the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light. Very yin and yang, which is what the whole thing is about, really: the natives of Gethen are ambisexual, that is they are neither man nor woman, or perhaps both, for most of the month, and then come into ‘kemmer’ for a few days – their sex is then decided by the others around them who are also coming into kemmer.
This way of looking at gender was really interesting, but I’ve got to say I wasn’t entirely sure what Le Guin was aiming to do. Her narrator for most of the book was male (from off-world), and he referred to all of the Gethenians as ‘he’. The only times they were described as female were almost derogatory or insulting, which I was really surprised and disappointed by. Now, maybe this is because they were a fairly non-aggressive race, so this was a male reaction to pacificism, but still, it was a bit uncomfortable to read.
Nonetheless, I actually did like the story. It was a poignant story, and she certainly doesn’t spare her characters. It hints at a much grander story – of the Ekumen, the not-governing body bringing 83 worlds together… the Hain, who seeded all of those world with humans… but the story itself, on Gethen, is also very personal and immediate. I think I liked it.
Farscape
We decided to give Farscape a go today, because we haven’t got series 5 of Stargate yet. I’m not yet totally convinced. We’re on to the second episode. I think I will definitely watch the eight episodes on these two discs, but it will have to be pretty riveting to get the rest of them. At least, as far as I know, there are only about 4 seasons of it, rather than the ten of Stargate; that’s not quite such a daunting undertaking, should I indeed undertake it. And hey, there’s a number of Aussies in it,and I believe that lots of it was shot here as well.
Randomly Yours, Alex 