I borrowed Lisa Yaszek's Galactic Suburbia from a library this week. I'm enjoying it. I've been writing female narrative characters more often lately, and I'm not sure why. After hearing an interview with the author on SciFiDimensions, and it sounded interesting. The ideas that women wrote about tie in nicely with modern science fiction's "slipstream" or "literary" push, that is, more towards "character-driven" instead of "gadget-driven" stories.
I'm not sure I'm capturing real people with the women I'm writing about, but I have three women who read my stuff and I trust them implicitly, I'm just not sure I can do everything they suggest with the stories.
Reading the book has inspired me to write. Reading a preview of jaylake's Green inspired a dark fantasy story that I'm tempted to write. It's great. I'm inspired to write, and I have two hours of free time to do something.
So I'm off. Wish me luck.
And in the meantime, check out Galactic Suburbia. It's a good read, sometimes dry, but it is an academic work, and it has given me a reading list with names like Judith Merrill and Shirley Jackson to explore.

PS. I work in a library, and love having access to books. I hate not being able to add my own marginalia to these books, so I consider a library book a test drive. Galactic Suburbia is now on my wish list for books. I think this book is worth owning and it deserves to be part of my permanent collection.

Tags: reading, sf, writing

Meme from http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/the-top-50-dystopian-movies-of-all-time/
Titles in bold are things I've seen. Asterisks indicate the items I've read the source for the movie (novel or short story)

1. Metropolis (1927)
2. A Clockwork Orange (1971)*
3. Brazil (1985)
4. Wings of Desire (1987)
5. Blade Runner (1982)*
6. Children of Men (2006)
7. The Matrix (1999)
8. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
9. Minority Report (2002)*
10. Delicatessen (1991)
11. Sleeper (1973)
12. The Trial (1962)
13. Alphaville (1965)
14. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
15. Serenity (2005)
16. Pleasantville (1998)
17. Ghost in the Shell (1995)
18. Battle Royale (2000)
19. RoboCop (1987)
20. Akira (1988)
21. The City of Lost Children (1995)
22. Planet of the Apes (1968)
23. V for Vendetta (2005)
24. Metropolis (2001)
25. Gattaca (1997)
26. Fahrenheit 451 (1966)*
27. On The Beach (1959)
28. Mad Max (1979)
29. Total Recall (1990)*
30. Dark City (1998)
31. War Of the Worlds (1953)*
32. District 13 (2004)
33. They Live (1988)*
34. THX 1138 (1971)*
35. Escape from New York (1981)
36. A Scanner Darkly (2006)*
37. Silent Running (1972)
38. Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)
39. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)*
40. A Boy and His Dog (1975)
41. Soylent Green (1973)*
42. I Robot (2004)*
43. Logan's Run (1976)
44. Strange Days (1995)
45. Idiocracy (2006)
46. Death Race 2000 (1975)
47. Rollerball (1975)
48. Starship Troopers (1997)*
49. One Point O (2004)
50. Equilibrium (2002)

In most cases, if I've read the book or story and not seen the movie, it's because I saw the previews and wept at what they did to the story. I've wept at some of the movies I have seen after reading the source material (Starship Troopers comes to mind).
Other than that, it's been slow

Tags: list, meme, movie, sf

I've enjoyed the new Dr. Who. I finally watched the episode Blink, which they didn't bother to air in the US until last Friday.
In short, this was a great episode. It was based on a short story that appeared in a Dr. Who anthology, which helps explain why the Doctor wasn't in it all that much. The teleplay and the short story have some differences, and I'm going to think about the teleplay.
It has a great creepy factor to it. Statues moving when you look away. About twenty minutes into it I remembered that this was Dr. Who, they're aliens or aliens are inhabiting them, but that didn't really stop the horror. Sally Sparrow having to figure things out with only odd help from the Doctor. Sally losing her best friend and having encounters with that friends grandson. Nothing is cooler.
The story itself doesn't have to be a Dr. Who story. It could have appeared with any characters and I think it would have worked just as well.
About 50 minutes into the story (according to our vcr) we started to wonder if we had a two-parter on our hand. It was good enough to warrant it, I think. But it didn't. It just wrapped itself up neatly and when we finally get to see the Doctor on some mission we don't know nothing about, he has no idea what she's talking about.
Sally Sparrow could be a great companion. Especially after the doctor regenerates. Won't that be fun?

Tags: craft, drwho, plot, sf, tv

I know Jay Lake. I have given up on a Jay Lake novel. I have critiqued a short story by Jay Lake that amounted to "what the hell is going on here?"
That being said, I enjoyed Mainspring. I enjoyed reading a novel that takes God seriously, but not so seriously that science is "an evil satanic thing designed to lure people away from faith." The story is a standard quest/hero's journey: Save the world. Leave everything behind and save the world. The world is quite nonstandard, something only Aristotle could have imagined, but not like this. The world is a real clock work world, and to save the world,Hethor, an apprentice horologist, must wind the mainspring.
The novel then takes the reader on a tour from New England to Antarctica, which means Hethor must get past the Wall, a massive structure that juts from the equator several miles (if the exact number is in the book I missed it) above the surface of the planet. Along the way he meets varied strange peoples, has more adventures than anyone probably wants, and gets abused in vastly creative ways. Everything he thought was serious before his quest began is ripped away from him. Yeah, that's what quests do to a character.
The villain seems to be at first one of the minor obstacles to Hethor's journey, and returns later to assert his world view dominance. But looking at what William of Ghent says, he seems to be just as religious asHethor, so the struggle of worldviews isn't so much a theism/atheism but a theism/Scientology debate.
The quest usually has a sad ending: in order to save the world Hethor must give it up. But Hethor doesn't lose it all. As cruel as Jay is to Hethor, he seems happier in the end than he started.
I am looking forward to Escapement, the current working title for the next book in this world, but by saving the world in the first book, I'm not sure how he will top that in book two.

Tags: books, fiction, review, sf