I just finished another Iain (M) Banks. Transition this time. Multiversey. I kinda liked it, except the ending was a bit rushed.
And I’m still reading the odd chapter of Piketty.
Going to start either China Mieville’s Iron Council or Steven Erikson’s The Bonehunters next.
I do have FilmCritHULK’s Screenwriting 101 to go through as well.
Thanks to Pinkwater, everytime I see a SF movie and the ship doesn’t have a Hydramatic drive, I am vastly disappointed.
He did call me “SciFi” boy once on Twitter though, so I got that going for me.
At least he didn’t call you Mike.
Read it, didn’t like it so much as the earlier two.
Blatted through The Martian.
Also, reading the odd chapter of Piketty, still.
@funruly will be pleased that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me came in, so I’ll be getting on with that shortly.
Finished Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey. Sandman Slim does his best to help death find out who trapped him in a human body and who is going to take over the job if he doesn’t figure it out in time. More fun pulpy supernatural action. Next up is Get Carter by Ted Lewis and I will get to compare and contrast with the movie as soon is makes it through the library hold queue.
Sitting on my desk… should be read before he comes to town next month.
I also managed to finish up Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Greenfield’s biography of Ahmet Ertegun The Last Sultan, Adorno’s Current of Music, most of Walter Benjamin’s The work of art in the age of its techological reproduction… Seems like there is something else, but it’s all sort of jumbled in my head right now.
Last thing I read, which took about 4 hours, was The Martian. Loved it, except for it being devoid of feelings or description of anything except survival processes. I can see why it drew the criticism it has, but I also really liked it since my brain likes technobabble shit.
But other than that… Hrm. Oh yeah, I’m in the muddle of The Emperor of All Maladies. Good book, and right up my alley for a number of reasons, but just can’t seem to seal the deal and finish it.
The rest is just research for my book. Umpteen million blog articles, readme’s, manuals, 5 gazillion google searches for the pieces and parts I need. Here’s something funny. I get my Chrome going so packed full, with probably about 200 tabs open, accumulating, accumulating, and then BAM! It crashes and then I start over. I don’t bother trying to backtrack. I just never close anything out and it takes care of itself about once a week. Another life metaphor.
Things have a way of clearing themselves out.
I’ll have more time for lit soon enough.
Oooh, do tell…something to do with making / your makerspace?
Nope… neither 
More industry-specific to my line of actual work: data science, buzzword of the day for data nerdery. Except my thing has a bunch of complementary software accompanying the text. Should be interesting. Well, I hope. We will see.
I’ve been going at it solid for about 8 months and I feel nowhere near done. It needs to get done, though, and quickly because it’s driving my wife and everybody else crazy that all I do is work on this thing and then get distracted and design plasma tables and hang out on boingboing and then bitch about not finishing my book.
Michael Caine, there is crap and then there is well some things are just painful bad rather than fun bad.
Caiphas Cain 2nd Omnibus (Sandy Micheal) Cain is almost the only 40k material i can stomach since the author went in for adventurey feeling times rather than BLACKER THAN THE BLACKEST BLACK TIMES INFINITY! grimdark. I’ts still recognizably 40k so some of that is there, but it’s less ‘everyone is so pants on head stupid I want to club them to death’ and even sorta makes fun of that kind of trend.
Well written, annotated throughout with the annotations actually themselves being funny, and shows tht you can have a surprising amount of sanity in the grim dark future.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (all five of Fitzgerald’s editions)
It occurred to me while reading that the story was kind of an amalgam of the least-stupid parts of the 2000 flops Red Planet and Mission to Mars. A lone astronaut forced to extend the lifetime of his habitat by growing his own crops: check. Long-shot rescue mission: check. Salvaging and modifying an old lander to function as a communication device: check. Astronaut forced to traverse dangerous landscape to a vehicle he can modify to take him into orbit for rescue: check.
Who knew there was such a compelling story in there once you threw in some geeky plausibility and took out all the contrived bullshit like aliens & killer robots? I’m also totally stoked that the previews for the movie version make it look like it’s going to be a pretty faithful adaptation.
Here’s what interests me about the movie. In the book, he spends an inordinate amount of time arranging and rearranging the water separator, oxygen generator, CO2 filters, hab tent, solar panels, suit parts, etc., into every conceivable configuration. After a while, I started to gloss over about it and just accept it, “yeah yeah, he’s got the ankle bone connected to the leg bone and the thingy connected to the other thingy now…” And so I’m just curious how they are going to address the constant rearranging of equipment in a compelling way in the movie or if it is even going to be front and center like it was in the book. If I were making the movie, I’d probably leave a lot of that stuff out because, frankly, even though I said I like process stuff, it did get a little boring.
Montage. Eye of the Tiger.
I was wondering that too. I imagine they probably won’t have enough time to dwell on it in that much detail anyway.
My guess is that they’ll go the Apollo 13 route. The basic science (and the risk) of what the astronauts and flight directors were attempting was largely explained in a way laypeople could understand by showing characters explaining it to each other, or news anchors explaining it to a viewing audience. Of course that approach would only work for certain scenes (since Watney is out of communication with Earth for so much of the story) so his diary entries would have to carry the rest.
Unless of course Watney brought along his SPACE VOLLEYBALL.
It looks like the oxygen containment feature is still working flawlessly.
It may have been a little corny, but that scene where Watney is forced to let Wilson float away in order to save himself still chokes me up every time.
