Britt's Blog

Jason and I ganged up on our book club and talked them into American Gods, despite some anti-SF sentiment, which gave me an excellent excuse to ignore all the grading I’m supposed to be doing and reread it.

I’m afraid I have little to say that is profound, because this is a book that just sucks me into its world. This novel is one of my favorites, but I can’t say it’s because of the plot, or the characters, or the setting. Which is not to say that any of those are lacking—quite the contrary. It’s the very fact that all these elements (plot, character, and setting) are so multilayered and complex that I’m utterly drawn into the world it creates, and at the end I’m just kind of left going “Wow. Like man, that was… like… really… Wow.”

For book-club-discussion purposes, I’ve made a few notes on certain elements, turns of phrase, themes, etc., but those are pretty boring and pretentious, so for here I’ll just note that I really love how Gaiman unravels a mystery, giving you enough hints and foreshadowing that you usually can figure it out—or at least sketch the vague outlines—before the Big Reveal. Noticing these masterful light touches having read the book before made them even more of a delight.

If you haven’t read American Gods, do it. IMHO it’s Gaiman’s strongest work, in prose or in graphic fiction, and given that Gaiman=Sheeer Genius that’s saying something.

I officially declare this law firm’s name to be: Unintentionally Hilarious.

[Also, file under "Jokes only Dan will get."]

The Gauss Law Firm.

The strange thing is, they’re injury lawyers, so they never actually CHARGE anyone with a crime!

Ha ha haaaaaa ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa….

*wipes tear from eye*

… Why, yes, it has been a long week. Why do you ask?

This 1968 Hugo Best Novel winner is eerily prescient ur-cyberpunk, touching on themes of race relations, overpopulation, eugenics and genetic manipulation, and the relationship between the West and the developing world. There are tentative steps toward the internet; citizens can call into a mainframe on the phone to get information from the computer, and a chapter of search engine results uncannily prefigures Google—right down to the targeted ads. In a foresight unusual in SF of this era, although the citizens enthusiastically abuse substances from designer hallucinogens to GM marijuana, tobacco cigarettes have been outlawed as too dangerous. There is a grimly familiar meatgrinder of a war, not with the Middle East but the Far East (against Communists—no surprise) where overthrowing a dictatorship is viewed by the US as an opportunity for a democratic toehold in the region. The style is replete with choppy jumps that remind me distinctly of MTV-style editing.

Stabbing insight is provided by social critic Chad Mulligan, the book’s Jubal Harshaw figure, whose wisdom serves as a counterpoint to the analysis of an idiot-savant supercomputer named Shalmaneser.

The book’s main theme is what human progress means; how we can become better than what we are, and what role technology can or should play. The enigmatic title refers to overpopulation; at the beginning of the book, the world’s entire population could stand within the borders of the nation of Zanzibar. At the end of the book, this is no longer possible. The central question of Stand on Zanzibar is whether the human race will find a way get along in a more and more crowded world.

[For some strange reason, this post gathers a disproportionate amount of comment spam so I have turned off comments for this post. If you would like to leave a comment, please let me know.]

Except this one.

From Jason’s blog.

Below are Time’s most significant SF novels between 1953-2006.

The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished, and put a star (*) next to the ones you love.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert *
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein *
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson*
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin *
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke *
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner [Well, I'm currently reading this one and have no intention of putting it down.]
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein *
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Although the movie was voiced over and introduced by an extremely boring man the section on naked people was interesting.

This student comment comes to you courtesy of my colleague in Art History.

Can you really ask for more from a web comic?

http://www.xkcd.com

They had me at “hello”, but this one seals the deal: “Come now, do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while strapped to a centrifuge?” “No Mister Bond, I expect you to die.”