Bits and Pieces

Happy Birthday Mom!!!

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was awesome!!! But I'm waiting for pics from someone else, so I'll write a post dedicated to that maybe Monday or Tuesday...

The book I'm reading (see sidebar) is not highly interesting to me. It's a "classic" sci-fi collection of 4 novels from the era when Clarke and others were just starting out. Pretty imaginative for 1972 or so, but it's just not very compelling.

The focus of the first novel is the technology. Looking back, it really didn't have any meat, in my terms. All of the characters were superficial. And there was one tech gap that needled at me - showing just how little involvement I had in the story. Set in 2030-something, they're inventing anti-gravity, building massively huge things on Jupiter, and discovering anti-death drugs - but they're still using mimeograph machines. The image of a spaceport official looking at documents with purple, banana-smelling ink just doesn't jive!

What is interesting, and what motivated me to post, well, anything, about the book, is that the second novel is entirely character focused, at least up to chapter 4. I feel as if someone else wrote it. Maybe Blish thought that he had the tech established enough in the first novel and that it wouldn't make sense to go into explicit detail in something set 300 years later. I don't know. Of course, I do see equations and junk in chapters ahead, so I may have to retract this.