Learning something new every day

[yendi]

Or four somethings:

1. I'd had no idea that Nancy Holder wrote the short story in the manual for my favorite computer game of all time.

2. I'm also very happy to have discovered Sogudi (thanks to Dixie), a very nice search address bar/search modifier for Safari. Not the same as the four million plugins for Firefox, but since I like Safari better on most other grounds (with the exception of how it handles drop-down menus in forms), it's nice to have a little bit more control over it.

3. When I was ten, I watched almost every episode of the TV series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (hey, it had MacGuyver playing a guy named "Adam"), which means that I was exposed to the writings of Sue Grafton over twenty years before I knew who she was.

4. Reading the latest novel from Charles Stross, it's clear that he read one of the same non-fiction books I did last year. That, or he read an article inspired by the same subject.

Comments

[gladstone.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Sue Grafton, what did you think of S is for Silence?

[cissa.livejournal.com]

re #4: I read "Accelerando" and was not impressed. The ideas were cool- the rest lacked quite a lot, I thought. Is this typical of him?

[jasra]

I didn't know there was a TV show for Seven Brides. I own the musical on DVD though!

[yendi]

Honestly, I've only read his fantasy, but I've heard great things about his sci-fi works (and keep meaning to read them). The writing in this one isn't as good as the writing in the first two books of the series, but it's still damned good.

[yendi]

I liked it a lot. Thought it was a nice change of pace, while still doing a great job of working on Kinsey as a character.

[yendi]

I suspect the show wasn't that good, but my tastes were a little less discriminating back then.

[jasra]

Ahh. You have seen the movie, right?

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I'd heard many good things about his sf, too. Isn't Accelerando nominated for some award, even? and yet, it was a chore for me to get through. It had all the "typical" flaws of sf- huge lumps of exposition, entirely flat characters, etc. Plus the whole set-up meant that normal constraints of narrative stopped applying, and there were so many dei ex machina- rather literally- that they needed a turnstile.

I think a truly excellent sf book could have been set in the world of the premise, but this wasn't anywhere close to that book. The excitement of the idea doesn't make up for the poor execution, IMHO. It reminds me a bit of the original Star Wars movie- when we first saw it in a theater, it was utterly mind-blowing... and then seeing it again, on cable TV, showed exactly how much of that first impression was the the dazzle of the images. Acclelerando, I think, is dazzling people with its premise enough that they're not seeing the rest.

*shrug* My opinion, obviously!