This book rather effectively simulates some drug trips I have been on, where sensations, experiences and thoughts seem to endlessly loop back around again and again. Unfortunately, just like those drug trips, the experience begins colorfully enough but the experience does not stop when the novelty and entertainment value wear off.

Read the rest of the review

It was an interesting, but not pleasurable experience. A lot of times media is compared to a drug trip, but this was probably the closest I have come — it just didn’t make for an actually readable book.

Makers by Cory Doctorow

My review of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Makers, is available from the SF Site:

Many science fiction novels ask, “What is the next big thing?” This is hardly a surprising trend. Within our own lifetimes, we have seen a succession of these next big things. It’s a theme as old as the genre itself. Makers, the extraordinary new novel by Cory Doctorow instead concerns two other, perhaps more interesting questions: “What does it mean to be the next big thing?” and “What happens after the next big thing?” >>Read More

In my review, one of the things I praise about the book is that even though it has dozens of fascinating ideas about the future, the characters are also real and compelling. It’s interesting to contrast my review with this one from Strange Horizons. I noticed a similar thing happen with my review of FlashForward.

Discussions of what makes a ‘good character’ have been raging on the ‘net for years; in particular I remember several debates about one of my favorite series, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, with some people claiming the characters are terrible and others that they are great. There’s many theories about why this happens, but I wonder whether some of it has to do with the composition of one’s social circle: all these books are largely about nerds, whether they are the geology nerds of Mars or the tech nerds of Makers. In my social circle are many geeky people who (as much as I deeply love them) are sometimes painfully socially inept and awkward in their dealings with the emotional, non-intellectual world. As a result, the sometimes painfully nerdy behaviors and wooden mannerisms that some of these characters exhibit remind me vividly of people near and dear to my heart. I wonder if some of the people complaining about how bad the characters are in a book like Makers just don’t know and love as many nerds as I do? I also wonder often these complaints are lobbed at Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which to me is one of the quintessential fictional examinations of the nerd personality.

“watching this film is like diving headlong into a disorienting, paranoid world of outer space visitors, grainy super-8 footage of floating trash-bins, and gun-toting bearded cultists from Switzerland”

This film is great fun if you are a lover of the occult, the Fortean or the weird like me. I recommend watching it with a few of your friends and perhaps a chemical relaxant of choice. The rest of my review is here.

My review of FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer is also available. I couldn’t help but compare the book to the TV series, which I watched a bunch of before giving up in frustration:

What I found incredibly frustrating about FlashForward, the television series, was the way it took this fantastic concept and buried it in a slightly futuristic procedural police drama about the brave FBI agents who investigate the crisis. … The deeper metaphysical issues of what it means to see the future were rarely played out to their full potential. Perhaps it’s to be expected, but the two versions of the story have almost diametrically opposed strengths.

It’s interesting to see the contrast between my review and this older SFSite review of the same book. Reviewer Donna McMahon pretty much panned the book back in 2002; she even criticizes some of the things I specifically cite as enjoying. While personal taste obviously plays a big role in any review, I can’t help but wonder if I went a little easy on this book simply because it was so much better than the TV show, and I spent so much time ranting about the TV show’s lost potential while I was watching it.

This may be the first time I’ve actually been reviewed rather than being the reviewer: Paul Graham Raven reviews the 2008 Arse Elektronika anthology, Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep, which features the paper I co-wrote with Reesa Brown, “What is the 21st-Century Novel?” Raven has quite a lot of praise both for my paper and the anthology. Even though I don’t see a penny if you buy it, I really recommend that you check out the anthology for yourselves.  You can also hear a mp3 of my presentation and follow along with a slideshow.

Sadly, the Continuous Coast project, which we discussed extensively in our paper, is quite moribund. Personal issues sank the project in the end, and I doubt it will ever be revived. I hope that people find the ideas we laid out in both the project and the paper useful, and I am curious to see where the 21st-century takes storytelling; I hope to be some small part of that tapestry too. I still mourn the ideas and nifty potential of the project though, and hope that at least some of our notes for it can still be released into the Creative Commons as we always intended them to be, eventually.

I’m feeling slightly discouraged at the moment. A rejection letter combined with a fairly hefty personal setback arrived within a couple days of each other. I’m sitting on the story for another day or two then reevaluating whether to send it out as is. I gotta keep writing anyway. If nothing else, I hope the first meeting of the Houston Art Nerds, which we’ll be scheduling soon, will perk me up again.

I just finished a review of The Billy Meier Story: UFO’s and Prophecies From Outer Space. For some reason, it’s also known as The Silent Revolution of Truth in certain markets. It’s almost exactly what you’d expect from the title, but I still managed to go on for 1,000 words about it. I’ll be sending the review to the SF Site later today and I’ll let you know when they publish it. I also know they will be posting a review of the Arse Elektronika 2008 anthology which features my paper on the future of the novel; I’m excited to share that with you when I am able too.

I didn’t include it in my review, but does anyone else think that the venerable RE/Search ought to be either offended or flattered that their logo was ripped off by Reality Entertainment, distributors of The Billy Meier Story?

I’ve decided I need artists around me being creative more often and I’d like to help cultivate some of the creative energies of my social circle at the same time. I’m trying to organize a semi-regular artist gathering in my area, where we could paint, write, compose, craft, or otherwise create in the company of others like us.  If you live in or visit the Houston area and you’re interested but I haven’t invited you to the Facebook group (or you aren’t on Facebook but want to know more), please let me know.