I just listened to The Gun Club’s first album, Fire Of Love. They’re a band that I heard of all through my student years – at least one good friend was a fan – but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now. It’s a scorchingly good album, and I’d recommend anyone who likes either punk or blues (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) to download it from Emusic forthwith.
It is immensely annoying that you can’t just download and install Firefox 3 on Linux (at least the Xandros distro that comes with the Eee PC) without having to install something called Gtk+ 2.10. Not least because you can’t just apt-get install the latter: you have to build it from source, and handle countless dependencies. Really, I thought we were supposed to have got past all that shit.
This page details the steps.
This is the motherlode of all brains-in-jars/life-is-a-computer-simulation-type stories. Gibson’s and the Wachowski’s Matrixes can both trace their origins back to here – or at least, they should be able to. I’m not aware of anything older than this that quite deals with this idea.
At Maiden Castle in Dorchester in the near future (of the time the book was written; it’s now our near past) a scientific research project has been under way for several years. It involves ‘projection’, in which the particpants, their bodies unconscious, enter into a shared, simulated fantasy world. This consensus hallucination was intended to examine a possible future, with a view to suggesting answers to some of the problems of today.
But one of the participants has been stuck in the projection for two years (when the normal period is measured in weeks or a few months at the most); the trustees are getting worried about the costs; and a new participant is about to arrive and change everything.
It is excellent, and (of course) leaves you wondering how many levels of fantasy there are to reality – both the book’s, and ours.
Phoenix has found water on Mars, by the way.
Why does no-one make themes that are fluid anymore? By which I mean ones that re-flow the text when you resize your browser window, of course.
Have just activated a new theme for this site. It’s called MNML, and it’s designed especially for quick posts. As ever, I’m not quite sure about it yet, but we’ll seee.
What a fine conceit. Take the two great science fiction works by one of the genre’s defining masters, mash them up together, and use the result to tell the ‘inside’ story of both of them.
It’s title is an obvious allusion to The Time Machine, but this is actually much more rooted in The War of the Worlds. And why shouldn’t those two novels take place in the same fictive universe? And why shouldn’t they be linked? After all, Mr Wells wrote both the stories down, so he must have experienced some of the events of both, right?
Priest sustains the tone and style of a late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century novel admirably well, and there’s not much to fault in this novel.
Except, perhaps, for the ending. The actual climax and conclusion of the story is well expected if you know The War of the Worlds. It’s just the last page or two; the rationale for the behaviour of one of the characters (a Mr Wells, in fact) in particular is, to my mind, inexplicable. Not that it matters, that late in the story, I suppose, but it does bother me.
I wish I had known about this novel a few years ack, when I read both The Time Machine and Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships. It would have sat very well in company with them.
I can’t decide on this David Davis thing Is it just a stunt? Is he genuinely concerned enough about civil liberties to take the chance (small though it is) of losing his seat? Certainly he sounds sincere when he talks about his concerns about the growth of state power; and Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty counts him as a friend, it seems.
But as others have pointed out he has a bad reputation on some other rights votes.
Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’d be better than “Kelvin Mc-bloody-Kenzie”:… (as backed by Rupert Murdoch, of course).
The most concerning thing, though, is the talk to the effect that the public is in favour of 42-day detention without trial. This member of the public most certainly is not, and I’m sure I’m by no means alone. And honestly: would people who’ve really thought it through be in favour of this kind of thing? I find it hard to believe. What happened, if it’s true, to the great British sense of fair play, of support for the underdog, even of disrespect for authority? Is this another facet of the grumbling about human rights I wrote about before?
Maybe we need to re-educate people about what is good and right. But how?
And then Ireland have voted ‘No’ to the EU treaty. I can’t help but think that this is a bad thing. The EU itself has been a net good for Europe and the world, as I’ve probably said here before. Whether these reforms will really make it better and more democratic, or not, I can’t say: I haven’t studied it.
Thing is, though, I would probably have been in favour of the EU constitution; if only because we could do with one in the UK. Admittedly, I’d want one that got rid of the monarchy and introduced an elected upper chamber in parliament, but one that further enshrined the European Convention on Human Rights would be a good start.
It would be quite difficult to amend it, mind you, since you’d need a Europe-wide referendum.
But I’m havering fancifully here: it was never meant to be that kind of constitution.
What now, then? Who knows, really. I expect they’ll either re-work it slightly and try again, or just apply various components of it without the treaty.
A scorching, searing cyberpunk space opera. It has everything in it: FTL starships, uploaded minds, nanotech, the Singularity, wormhole gateways… Absolutely stunning stuff.
Though on the downside, I did find it bit hard to follow some of the plot twists and turns. Specifically, it wasn’t always immediately obvious to me why some of the alliances and disputes between the various factions happened. I expect a more careful reading, or retracing of my steps, would have resolved those difficulties. But such was the pace of the plot that I didn’t want to.
I loved some of the terminology. Travelling faster than light, for example, is called ‘fittling’ (from FTL). The technological singularity is called the ‘hard rapture’. I especially like that Ken has grabbed the term ‘Rapture’ from the weirdo fundamentalists christians who believe Jesus is going to come back and sweep them all up to heaven. The Googleplex (for example) becoming self-aware and sucking up everyone’s mindstate is far more likely, if you ask me. Which is not saying a lot about its likelihood…
One of the groupings of humanity that have survived through the hard rapture, and remain players on galactic stage, are called the Carlyles. They started out as a Glasgow gang, basically. They were based in something called ‘The Castle on the Clyde ‘, which I’d like to hear more about. Then there’s AO: America Offline. They didn’t get uploaded because they weren’t connected to the net.
This means that the two main dialects of the language everyone speaks are called ‘American’ and ‘English’; but the ‘English’ is rendered partly in Scots. Good fun.
I haven’t read any of Ken’s stuff for a while (aside from his blog, obviously). That’s a situation I need to put right forthwith. But first I think I should go back to the start, and dig The Star Fraction out of the attic.
I’m trying out an offline blogging client that runs on Linux (these things are not that easy to come by). It’s called Drivel, and it seems to work OK, as long as you tell it that your WordPress installation is actually Movable Type.
Oh, and it looks like it only supports one category per post, and no native tags. Not very impressive, really.
Since I tend to draft in jEdit, I’ve often thought that what I need is a blogging plugin for that, and been surprised that it doesn’t exist. One of these days I’ll have to write it…
(ETA: tags added later via the web interface. Far from satisfactory, really.)
(E further TA: damn, it looks like this theme isn’t showing native WordPress tags, anyway.)