Books + Welcome
So, I am going to attempt to start this thing up, I am paying actual money for it after all.
I have been playing around with the RSS, and it may or may not be working. It also may or may not show up as a button on the site. However you should all get chrome and install the extension that puts a little RSS button on the url bar to solve this problem. Or click this link: RSS it has a 50/50 chance of being the right thing.
I am also going to play around with the settings and the themes to make things generally better. This will do for now though.
So, I have just read some books, and they were pretty awesome, so I thought I would tell others about them and help spread the awesome around.
I read 2001 while in the states, my first Arthur C Clarke book, it was a bit of a slow start but this seems to be a pretty common thing in his books (based on the two I have read). It starts off describing how an unseen alien race uses their advanced technology to explore other worlds, including earth, and push the indigenous population, in the case early man, in the right direction in evolutionary terms. Jump forward to 1999 and they discover some of the alien tech on the moon, which when uncovered sends a signal to the other side of Saturn. So obviously someone goes an jumps in a space ship and follows the signal, it takes 18 months but they finally get close, and this is where the 'story' starts. I will leave things there because I really don't want to ruin things for y'all, I am sure you all know enough about HAL from various parodies to know roughly what happens.
This seems to be a common story telling method for Clarke, and it is a pretty damn good one. A long set up with loads of irrelevant details to the history behind the subject of the story, which ultimately has little effect on the actually 'story' part of the book, but just makes things more relevant, you become more engrossed in the universe the book is trying to tell you about.
2001 was an epic book, and I think it's sequel 2010 may be next for me to read.
More recently I have read another Arthur C Clarke book, "The Fountains of Paradise", and it had a very similar story telling structure. The first part of the book was set in a mythical Kingdom 2000 or so years ago, then jumps forward to the building of a space elevator and then forward again to when there are many space elevators all connected by a giant orbital ring housing most of the remaining human population of earth. Around this was weaved a sub plot of humanity's first encounter with an alien race, an automated probe sent from a star system 52 light years away on an impossibly long mission to explore the stars. Anyway, I am not going to regurgitate the plot, you can read the book for that, or at the very least Wikipedia.
The future spoken about was one that really appealed to me, one where these giant engineering projects actually took place, but as a whole the world was roughly the same. There were still financial and political problems to be overcome, there was no never ending war, no huge social unrest to speak of, it was just as if you took today's society and put it 100 years in the future. This is very unlike "The Forever War", which is coming up next....
Apologies for my less than amazing writing, but it is not something I do too often and is one of the reason I am going to do this sort of thing more. I figure if I write a page or so of 'stuff' every week then eventually I will get better at writing. Make sense?
Expect to read about generally random things that interest me and may or may not interest you and the rest of the internet.