Have you seen the stars tonite?

The postman delivered a very heavy box today - thank FSM for Media Mail!

It's the six-volume hardcover reprinting of the complete run of Mattachine Review (1955-1966).

I can't wait to dig into these.

If you don't know what Mattachine Review is, Google it. But you already know, right?

It seems fitting to receive this today, as we saw How to Survive a Plague yesterday (the three of us were 3/4 of the patrons at a 4:30 screening.) It was amazing, heartbreaking and inspiring. You should see it.

A couple of nonfiction books slowed me down this month, but reading Delany's scholarly stuff was definitely worth the time.

08/03/2012    Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy by Jon Stebbins
08/04/2012    Will-o-the-Wisp by Thomas Burnett Swann
08/07/2012    Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) by Samuel R. Delany
08/09/2012    Ringworld’s Children (audiobook) by Larry Niven
08/10/2012    The Not-World by Thomas Burnett Swann
08/13/2012    Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein
08/17/2012    The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (audiobook) by Richard Dawkins
08/19/2012    The Goat Without Horns by Thomas Burnett Swann
08/24/2012    Doctor Who: Shada (audiobook) by Gareth Roberts based on a screenplay by Douglas Adams
08/26/2012    Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? ...and Other Reflections on Being Human by Jesse Bering
08/30/2012    Fate of Worlds:Return from the Ringworld (audiobook) by Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner

I finished my three-month reading program of Thomas Burnett Swann in August -- apart from the three volumes in the "Minotaur Trilogy," I read all the fiction Swann ever published in June, July and August. (I read the MInotaur Trilogy perhaps a decade ago, and wasn't ready for a re-read quite yet.) I really enjoyed spending time in Swann's Not-World. Great stuff.

I slotted in Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 because I kept seeing references to Nehemiah Scudder (usually in articles about "Mittens" Romney) and wanted to get an idea what it was all about. After reading Revolt in 2100 (and Heinlein's notes about "stories not written" that would have chronicled Scudder's rise to power) I recalled reading some of this when I was in junior high (side note -- I pulled out my old Heinlein paperbacks, and found that the bookmark I was using was a note excusing me from class to go to the orthodontist to get my braces adjusted. When I was 13 or 14. So I abandoned reading that particular book almost 40 years ago... How time flies!) Back then, I thought the notion of America falling into a religious dictatorship was ludicrous. How naive I was!

Reading about Dennis Wilson's life and death was just sad. What a waste! Listen to his brilliant solo album Pacific Ocean Blue and weep for the loss of a great talent. POB unquestionably rates as the best record to come out of the Beach Boys camp since Pet Sounds -- and better than anything since, including Brian's stuff, with the possible exception of SMiLE.

Ringworld's Children and Fate of Worlds were much better than the preceeding couple of Ringworld books, but not quite as enjoyable as the Fleet of Worlds quartet. But Fate of Worlds provides a nice capstone to Niven's Known Space series, and if he never gets back around to it, this is a good ending.

Gareth Roberts's novelization of the legendary lost Douglas Adams Doctor Who serial Shada was an enjoyable listen -- perhaps more for Lalla Ward's excellent reading than for the somewhat ponderous and overpadded novelization itself. Seriously, stretching 6 half-hour episodes into a 400+ page novel was occasionally tedious. But great fun! It was nice seeing Dr. Chronotis again (Adams salvaged the character for Dirk Gently) and the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), the Second Romana (Lalla Ward) and even K-9.

Dawkins is awesome. I loved Greatest Show on Earth. It was interesting listening to that, surrounded by Niven's books which maintain that humans are descended from aliens transplanted from another world. I wonder how badly Niven wishes he's never come up with that conceit, because it's utterly untenable in light of what we know today -- and probably even knew when he came up with the Pak. That's the danger with writing "Hard" science fiction -- science doesn't stop discovering more about the universe, rendering story ideas ludicrous or worse.

Jesse Bering's collection of "popular" science essays was entertaining, but perhaps better read as occasional articles than straight through. And his explanation for why the human penis is shaped as it is is kind of gross, but convincing.

Delany's Starboard Wine, originally published in 1984, is largely aimed at showing why all those "Science Fiction as Literature" courses that were popping up in the '70's and '80's were wrong-headed. He convincingly argues that "science fiction" is a way of reading (and a corpus of texts meant to be read that way.) "Literary" fiction is read differently that science fiction, and to read SF as lterature is to read it wrong -- or, at least, read it less effectively. The best way to read SF is to read it AS SF. I'm good with that.

We saw a film yesterday at the LGBT film festival ("Damn! These Heels" has got to be the stupidest name for a film festival ever. But I digress...)

It was Cloudburst with Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker. It was wonderful for about the first 90% of the movie, then the motivations all fell apart in the last 15 minutes or so. Seriously, if you've see it -- can ANYONE explain what the motivations of Stella and Dot were, from right after the pub scene through to the end? I just can't imagine real people making the choices they did. And, of course, one of the lesbians {SPOILER!} has to die at the end. Why couldn't they go on and live a few more happy years together? Are we still not past the "homo must die" cliche in movies?

Dukakis was really good; she should've gotten an Oscar nomination for this performance, but the script really let her and Fricker down at the end.

Came home and watched John Carter on DVD. Surprisingly, since I don't like much of anything, I quite liked this film. Why did people hate it so much? It was no dumber than any of a dozen other superhero movies that make the fanboys swoon. It was significantly better than Prometheus, which some people are having religious experiences over.

Considering how busy June was (Pride Weekend, Beartown Weekend, working my way back to a regular workout schedule) I got some good reading in, mostly in the second half of the month.

06/01/2012    Devil May Care (audiobook) by Sebastian Faulks
06/10/2012    Redshirts by John Scalzi
06/11/2012    Star Trek: Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within (na) by Christopher L. Bennett
06/14/2012    Fleet of Worlds (audiobook) by Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner
06/18/2012    The Minikins of Yam by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/19/2012    The Murex (nv) by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/21/2012    Juggler of Worlds (audiobook) by Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner
06/21/2012    Winged Victory (ss) by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/21/2012    Night of the Unicorn (ss) by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/23/2012    Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/24/2012    Queens Walk in the Dusk by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/26/2012    The Dryad-Tree (ss) by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/26/2012    The Painter (ss) by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/26/2012    The Sudden Wings (nv) by Thomas Burnett Swann
06/28/2012    Destroyer of Worlds (audiobook) by Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner
06/30/2012    Green Phoenix by Thomas Burnett Swann

Scalzi. Sigh. I know he's beloved of the geekarati, but he's just not to my taste. His snarky smart-ass protagonists don't appeal to me. It's like those profiles you see on Certain Websites where the dude thinks sneering and flipping you the bird is somehow attractive. No, just tiresome. Thus with Scalzi's characters. It's too bad, because the idea behind Redshirts is kind of cool. Frankly, I enjoy his blog a lot more than his novels.

Read Christopher Bennett's Star Trek: Typhon Pact e-novella The Struggle Within. That's a terribly generic title; the story was better. I was intending to start David R. George III's new Typhon Pact duology (Plagues of Night & Raise the Dawn) right after that, but got sidetracked.

Thomas Burnett Swann wrote short lyrical fantasy novels (most were really novellas, by current SFWA definition) and stories about the interactions between humans and prehuman intelligent creatures who populated ancient Earth.These interactions have come down to us in the forms of myths and legends. Swann's books and stories are truly wonderful. And so very, very gay - in the best possible way. Swann is one of those lost & forgotten writers who certainly deserves to be remembered and read today. He died in 1976; the last time any of his work was in print in English was in 1996. Why doesn't the estate make it available in ebooks, at the very least? My old DAW and Ace and Ballantine paperbacks are getting pretty tattered.

The Niven/Lerner Fleet of Worlds series remind me a bit of those late-career novels by Asimov where he tried to stitch his three independent series into a single future history -- with mixed results. Niven seems to be attempting something similar here, adding context around seemingly-unrelated stories such as "Neutron Star" and "The Soft Weapon". They're enjoyable listening while at the gym or driving back and forth to work, but when Ron gets in the car with me I just shut off the sound system. It's too much work trying to explain how the current narrative fits together with Niven stories he read 3 or 4 decades ago...

May is Sint Maarten month, so I got my 2 weeks at the beach. Unfortunately, it rained almost every day we were there. Not all day, but it did cut into some tanning time. Then all three of us were sick with a really persistent respiratory infection. John was sick before we left home; Ron got it next, then I got it last. I had the mildest bout, because John is still going through the final stages, and I've been pretty good for the last week.

So, between those two things I didn't get to do as much as I'd hoped. I still haven't been to any of the neighboring islands (Anguilla, St. Barths, Saba) and this was the year I was definitely going to make a day trip to at least ONE of them.

I did get to read:

05/06/2012    You Only Live Twice (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
05/06/2012    A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies that Suck by Roger Ebert
05/11/2012    Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made? By David Hughes
05/14/2012    Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock by Christopher L. Bennett
05/15/2012    Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History by Christopher L. Bennett
05/16/2012    Speaking of he Fantastic by Darrell Schweitzer
05/18/2012    The Jester at Scar by E.C. Tubb
05/19/2012    Star Trek: That Which Divides by Dayton Ward
05/20/2012    Lallia by E.C. Tubb
05/23/2012    The Man With The Golden Gun (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
05/25/2012    Free Amazons of Darkover edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley
05/27/2012    Jack Vance: The Moon Moth (gn) adapted by Humayoun Ibrahim
05/27/2012    Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany

It was the last book I finished in May, but I really spent the entire month reading Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. I would just have to stop every few chapters and read something less disgusting before going back to it. Seriously, I just don't need 500 pages of the uninterrupted consumption of cum/piss/toejam/snot/dickcheese/shit. I may be exaggerating -- but not by much.

Once Delany gets through the preliminaries, the last 300 pages (yes, this novel is 800 pages long) was a very nice novel about the lives of these characters, starting in the present and extending some 70 years into the future. On that level, it was SF -- but the characters live so far off the beaten track that the technological marvels of the coming decades barely touch them; they seem stuck in the world of 70's porn classics like "L.A. Tool & Die." Which ain't a bad world to be stuck in, all things considered.

If you revere Delany, read it. Otherwise, skip it.

Three Star Trek novels. The two by Christopher Bennett were excellent and even mind-bending in a "time travel is complicated" kind of way. Ward's offering was good, but seemed a bit longer than the story really required.

A couple more Dumarest novels by Tubb. What were these about again?

The graphic novel retelling of Vance's classic short story "The Moon Moth" was effective, even if I didn't think much of the artwork.Vance is awesome.

The last two Fleming 007 books both showed evidence that Fleming was close to being tapped out at the time of his death. In fairness, Golden Gun was only half-finished; Fleming had planned to rewrite most of it, but died before he could do so. So the publishers put it out anyway.

I love Roger Ebert's reviews of bad movies. These reviews are actually more entertaining NOW than when originally written, because I usually have some awareness of the movie being reviewed, even if I've never seen it (I think there were only 1 or 2 that I'd seen out of a hundred or more reviews in the book.)

Currently reading some kind of random stuff, waiting for something to grab me -- another volume of Darkover short stories, another Space: 1999 book, a couple Star Trek novels. Currently listening to Devil May Care, the 2008 James Bond novel by Sebastain Faulks. He could've spent some time working on the pacing, but it's OK. I liked it better when I read it right after it came out.

Dammit, it was a busy month! I had political stuff that pretty much took up most of EVERY SATURDAY this month. And supporting/associated activities took up another half-dozen evenings. That, plus work and workouts really cut into the book-reading time. I only finished 2 (yes, TWO) books this month. Gym listening was confined to 7 more James Bond novels.

At least I leave Friday for my annual two weeks in Sint Maarten; two weeks of glorious beach reading. The iPad and Nook are primed and ready.

What I did finish this month:
04/05/2012    Diamonds Are Forever (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
04/07/2012    Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album by Ken Caillat with Steven Stiefel
04/11/2012    From Russia, With Love (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
04/15/2012    Doctor No (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
04/21/2012    Goldfinger (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
04/25/2012    Thunderball (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
04/28/2012    The Spy Who Loved Me (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
04/29/2012    Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers
04/30/2012    On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (audiobook) by Ian Fleming

That's 7 Ian Fleming James Bond audiobooks, a memoir on the making of Fleetwood Mac's classic album Rumours by its co-producer, and Tim Powers's long-awaited new novel.

First, the Bonds. Well, they're nice and short. And deeply sexist, racist, and just about every other -ist you can think of. Fleming states at least twice in 3 books that women long to be raped. I'm not entirely sure that's true. No, wait, I'm sure that's complete and utter bullshit. Unless "rape" meant something entirely different a half-century or so ago. Nope, it was the same thing. Nobody would unironically write those words today, except to paint a character as a complete piece of shit. Progress!

Ken Caillat's Fleetwood Mac memoir was an interesting read. I might have included more about how particular sounds were achieved, and less about Lindsey Buckingham choking his girlfriends, but that's just me. It did send me back to the FM catalog. For an album I pretty much despised when it was new (mostly because you couldn't turn on KFXD back in those days without hearing a Fleetwood Mac song) I've discovered that Rumours, it's predecessor (Fleetwood Mac) and, especially, it's successor (Tusk) are truly amazing records. Hopefully Caillat will write a sequel about recording Tusk. There must be some great stories there -- certainly Lindsey must've had new girlfriends to abuse.

What to say about Hide Me Among the Graves..? It's beautifully written, with Victorian atmosphere dripping from every pore, but it never really engaged me. Tim has now covered the bulk of the 19th century in London, between The Anubis Gates, The Stress of Her Regard, A Time to Cast Away Stones, and Hide Me Among the Graves. Maybe there's just not that much left to surprise me with. Maybe it's because the Pre-Raphaelites mean absolutely NOTHING to me. Maybe it's because I read the first three of those four books over the last couple months, and the new one doesn't come close to matching the gonzo-manic intensity of The Anubis Gates. Which, lest we forget, is one of the books that defined "Steampunk" as a genre. (Of course, NOTHING matches Anubis Gates except possibly Declare. Or Last Call.)

Or maybe it was just because I was hoping Tim would take the opportunity to weave William Ashbless into the narrative, thus turning it into another accidental series, like Last Call/Expiration Date/Earthquake Weather.

It seems strange saying that a book that includes Queen Boadicea and John Polidori as Nephilim/Vampires, a reformed whore who had the misfortune of having one of a Vampire's "family" among her clients, a veterinarian aided by an army of the ghosts of his dead charges (cat ghosts and horse ghosts, for example) and the Vampire's "family" including the four Rossetti siblings, all inhabiting a milieu where there are skull-shaped caverns under the streets of London inhabited by the aforementioned Vampires... well, to call all that "not weird enough" seems churlish. Nevertheless, that was my reaction upon finishing the book last night. Compared to Powers earlier output, this was practically mainstream. **SIGH!** Maybe that will be good for sales.

Not sure what I'll be reading in May, apart from several books partially finished. Likely to be first up are:
Star Trek: That Which Divides by Dayton Ward
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany
The Alton Gift by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Deborah J. Ross
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock by Christopher Bennett
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History by Christopher Bennett

Delany's new one is quite good, once you get past the coprophagy. I downloaded the ebook from B&N, then learned that the publisher had inadvertently left out an entire chapter. D'OH! With the help of an errata page and a .pdf of the missing chapter from Delany's agent (and an etext unencumbered by DRM) I was able to "correct" my copy in Sigil. Someone wagged that my ebook wasn't "Mint" any more. BFD. I'd rather have it correct.

It's been a busy month. Work has been very stressful -- one full week of training early in the month (NEVER do 5 straight days of training. I was toast by Thursday afternoon, so Friday was pretty much a complete waste...) And this last week we had sessions with the vendor and the project SME's that were profitable, but exhausting. Oh, and never let your system vendor hire an all-new team to implement their product. We've been at this for a full year, but the vendor's BA's still seem clueless about what their system can and can't do. I facilitated for about 3 hours on Thursday afternoon, after the vendor team left for the airport, and the SMEs said I did a better job explaining how the system works than the vendor team -- and I've probably spent less than 40 hours in the system over the last year. Flattering, but also frightening, as it makes the vendor team look incompetent.

Just sayin'.

I also spent about 15 hours (evenings & Saturdays) at Democratic Party HQ working on the Platform Committee for the Salt Lake County Democratic Party. I missed the final meeting on Thursday evening because I had neglected to take my 12-hour Sudafed that morning, and by the time I left work, I had a Richter-10 sinus headache, so I came home and crashed. Yay for early allergy season!

And I'm still managing to get to the gym about 3 times a week. Weight is up, but the waist is smaller -- shirts feeling tighter across the pecs rather than belly. This I can live with.

All this explains why I haven't really read as much this month as the last couple. But still, I did get through a huge number of Farscape comics one weekend. That was lots of fun!

Here's the skinny:

03/04/2012    Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips by Jim DeRogatis
03/08/2012    Farscape: The Beginning of the End of the Beginning (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Patterson
03/09/2012    Farscape: Strange Detractors (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/09/2012    Farscape: Gone and Back (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Patterson
03/09/2012    Farscape: Tangled Roots (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/09/2012    Farscape: Red Sky at Morning (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/10/2012    Farscape: Scorpius: Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (gn) by O’Bannon & Mack/Ruiz
03/10/2012    Farscape: Compulsions (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/10/2012    Farscape: Scorpius: Glorious Basterds (gn) by O’Bannon & Mack/Ruiz
03/10/2012    Farscape: The War for the Uncharted Territories I (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/10/2012    Farscape: The War for the Uncharted Territories II (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/10/2012    Farscape: The War for the Uncharted Territories III (gn) by O’Bannon & DeCandido/Sliney
03/12/2012    The Selfish Gene (audiobook) by Richard Dawkins
03/15/2012    Babel-17 (audiobook) by Samuel R. Delany
03/18/2012    Traitor’s Sun by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Adrienne Martine-Barnes
03/19/2012    Colonel Sun (audiobook) by "Robert Markham" (Kingsley Amis)
03/23/2012    Casino Royale (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
03/26/2012    Live and Let Die (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
03/31/2012    Moonraker (audiobook) by Ian Fleming

The book about the Flaming Lips was a fun read. Those guys are kind of amazing. Saw them last summer, and they put on the funnest concert I've yet seen. As I said at the time, a Flaming Lips concert is like watching performance art where the audience gets to be in on the joke, rather than being it's butt.

Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the very best Star Trek novelists. Unfortunately, he seems to have fallen out of favor with the bean counters at Pocket Books (no new Trek from KRAD for 3 or 4 years.) His Farscape comics were excellent fun. Reading through the equivalent of 44 issues over the course of a weekend felt like another season of the show. Now I want to go back and re-watch the entire series. And I want to read his Farscape novel from 2002. It's in the stack...

The only novel I read this month was the third of Adrienne Martine-Barnes's dire Darkover titles. Lord in heaven, reading that was a slog. Glad that's over with. With any luck I'll never have to suffer through that again.

On the audiobook front, I started the month with a couple deadly-serious books. Dawkins's first book, the landmark The Selfish Gene, was brilliant. I thought he went on a bit at times (three examples are as compelling as 12) but I feel like I have an understanding of evolution that I've never had before. Again he shared reading duties with the wonderful Lalla "Romana" Ward. I think I'm a little bit in love with her.

I followed up with Delany's Babel-17. When first published in 1966 it caused a sensation, picking up a Nebula award and a Hugo nomination. 45 years on, it's less groundbreaking. The idea that the way one perceives the universe is shaped by language (rather than the other way around) is pretty widely accepted today, but was revolutionary then. Some of the stylistic tricks feel dated, and get in the way of the narrative. However, if you've never read it, you really should. Delany is one of the few geniuses who have ever written SF. He should be treasured and studied -- and I'm sure he will be in generations to come.

Then I went for something lighter -- the original Ian Fleming James Bond books. I read through the entire series in a single gulp a decade or so ago, so I was prepared for the crushing sexism. What came as a big surprise was the pervasive racism -- especially in Live and Let Die. I wasn't prepared for casual use of the n-word, or the patronizing view of people of color. Fleming was probably being fairly progressive in 1954, but today it makes for a painful read. I suppose that's a testament to how far we've come. I hope so, anyway.

Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun was the first James Bond title written after Fleming's death, and it's pretty damn good. Published in 1968, it apparently bombed, so the Fleming estate didn't commission any more pastiches for another dozen years, when License Renewed began a 2-decade run in which at least 1 new James Bond novel was published each year.

Currently reading  the following:
The Alton Gift by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Deborah J. Ross
Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers
Star Trek: That Which Divides by Dayton Ward
Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey by Ardath Mayhar

As soon as it comes out on April 10th, I'll start:
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany

I don't generally read 4 or 5 different books at a time, but sometimes I start new titles when the current one hasn't grabbed me yet. That may be what's happening here -- but I'm just about ready to put everything else aside and focus on Hide Me Among the Graves. Powers is awesome.

Themes this month: Space:1999, James Bond in 2 flavors, a couple MZB's, and a group of Luff Imbry short stories by the brilliant Matthew Hughes.

01/01/2012    Space: 1999: Rogue Planet by E. C. Tubb
01/03/2012    The Survivors by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Paul Edwin Zimmer
01/04/2011    The Eyes of the Overworld (audiobook) by Jack Vance
01/08/2012    Space: 1999: Alien Seed by E.C. Tubb
01/11/2012    Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories (audiobook) by Ian Fleming
01/12/2012    The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb
01/15/2012    The Heirs of Hammerfell by Marion Zimmer Bradley
01/18/2012    Derai by E.C. Tubb
01/24/2012    Carte Blanche (audiobook) by Jeffrey Deaver
01/26/2012    Space: 1999: Shepherd Moon edited by Mateo Latosa
01/28/2012    Passion Ploy (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/28/2012    Nature Tale (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/28/2012    Enemy of the Good (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/28/2012    Another Day in Fibberty (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/28/2012    The Meaning of Luff (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/28/2012    The Farouche Assemblage (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/28/2012    The Eye of Vann (ss) By Matthew Hughes
01/30/2012    The Anubis Gates (audiobook) by Tim Powers

Tubb's Space: 1999 novels are better than expected -- quick, breezy reads. Remember when they used to be able to tell a complete story in 160 pages? Those were the days! Today, SF & Fantasy writers can barely clear their throats in under 500 pages. The Space: 1999 story collection from a couple years ago was wildly uneven -- from good (Tubb and Brian Ball, genuine SF writers who contributed to the Space: 1999 novelizations back in the day) to bottom-drawer fan fiction. Definitely missible.

After enjoying Tubb's Space: 1999 books, I decided to try reading some of his long-running Dumarest of Terra series. I started collecting this series in junior high school, up until the mid-80's, when the publisher gave up on it after #31, but as best I can recall have never actually read one. The first two were better than I expected, and am currently reading the third one. As these are blissfully concise, I can easily read one in a single lazy afternoon, so I'll keep some on the Nook and iPad for "snacking."

Deaver's James Bond "reboot," Carte Blanche, is really, really good. It made me want to run out and read more Deaver, which is a good sign. I hope he writes more Bond books. I could do with one a year no problem.

Matthew Hughes is one of my very favorite writers. His most recent novel, The Other, features his rascally forger-thief character, Luff Imbry. It also features some of the sharpest satire I've read in a long time. You should read it. Yes, right now.

Anyway, Hughes's publisher, Angry Robot, has obtained rights to 7 Luff Imbry shorts (published between 2005 & 2008 in F&SF, PostScripts and the odd anthology) and made them available as reasonably-priced e-texts (I got all 7 from the Angry Robot website for $3.99, after all kinds of discounts and price conversion from pounds to dollars) and read them on Saturday. Delightful.

Two MZB pieces down this month: The Survivors, her second collaboration with her brother, Paul Edwin Zimmer. I strongly suspect that PEZ did the actual writing -- the book is stuffed with a kind of gently explicit sexuality that Marion would never write. I'm actually surprised that she let it go out under her name. I then tackled the last Darkover book Marion wrote on her own, The Heirs of Hammerfell. This book is not well regarded among Darkover cognoscenti. For about 2/3 of the book, I was puzzled by the reaction, because it seemed a perfectly acceptable entry into the series, illuminating the period after the Ages of Chaos, as the Comyn were just starting to consolidate the Hundred Kingdoms into the familiar Seven Domains. Then it turned into a sappy romance novel, with a cliched ending that was painfully forced, and suddenly I understood the hate. Damn.

Consulting my MZB database (yes, I know having a MZB database makes me an ubergeek. So?) I see that I don't have a whole lot left to read. There are a couple pieces I don't have (anyone out there have a copy of the Mattachine Review Vol. 7 Number 4? Apparently Marion has a story in it) but of what I have in the collection, I either have to read some of the late-period ghostwritten stuff or the "lesbian" potboilers. I tried both Black Trillium and Tiger Burning Bright and was horrified by the generic "fantasy princess" plots and the fairly dreadful writing. I Don't know if I'm going to be able to force these down. Maybe Glenraven will be better. If not, lesbian potboilers, here I come!

Spent most of the weekend listening to The Flaming Lips' 24-hour "song," 7 Skies H3. Or, to be more accurate, I had it playing while doing other things (reading, surfing, etc.)

Some sections I really like. some sections I really dislike. Has anyone else listened to it? Any thoughts?

Just got home from seeing Almodóvar´s latest, (The Skin I Live In in English).

I don't know what to think. It was beautiful to look at, but kind of cold & distant. No emotional connection to the characters -- perhaps because they were all despicable on one level or another.

Still, I want to see it again and see if my reaction is any different on a second viewing.