John's comments (member since Jan 13, 2008)

John's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.

I was ready to nominate or second Grendel, so I guess I'll third it here. Great book, told from the perspective of the monster in the Beowulf legend.

Jeffrey, I don't know the Joe Abercrombie book, but I don't think any of the other three are really "from the villain's point of view." Wizard's First Rule is from the good guys' POV, Thomas Covenant is a reluctant hero and does a bad thing or too, but he's not the villain--Lord Foul is, and although it's been years since I read it, I don't think we ever get his POV. And the same is true of The Golden Compass--all these have interesting villains, perhaps, and we might even see why they don't see themselves as villains, but that's not the same thing as being from their POV.

Just my $.02.

I'd be tempted to nominate To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust, which is *kind of* a re-telling of Paradise Lost from Satan's perspective. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure it fits, in that Satan is really the hero of the story--that is to say, it's tough to see him as a villain in this version of the story. If things went down *this* way, then Satan *is* the hero of the story! I compare that to Grendel, where--although we may sympathize with--we still see him as doing villainous things.

But what the heck, I'll nominate To Reign in Hell and others can weed it out if so inclined.

I heard an author say once that a screenplay is roughly a 120-page novel. Any movie adaptation is going to leave a lot out. It's fairly amazing that any movie made from a book is ever any good--unless the author was overly verbose in the first place!

On balance, I was film was pretty well done--but I'll take the book any day.

And yes, two movies for book seven. I think I heard that the first one is due out in November 2010 and then July 2011 for the second, but who knows whether they'll be able to stick to that schedule.

Zen, your story reminded me of my time working at Borders (I chose my summer jobs in grad school based on where I wanted a discount). It was pretty much par for the course there for employees to spend our hour lunch break reading, but I didn't stop there. When I was out on the floor stocking the Lit section (my section), I would work quickly on stocking the books, then sit down and read a chapter at a time, right out there on the floor. Or when I had to go back to get more books from the back to put out, I'd do likewise.

The weird thing is that the managers were consistently telling me what a great job I was doing, how quickly and well I got my job done...imagine what I could have done if I'd been really dedicated!

As an aside, working at Border's really was a pretty sweet job. Beyond the discounts--which were pretty good and would have been even better if I'd been full-time--they encouraged us to use the store like a library, taking books home with us, because they wanted us to be knowledgeable about what we were selling. Plus, at least at our store, most everyone there were avid readers and interesting people.

Judging by my own experience with British friends and marmite, I would guess that a marmite author must be someone that British folks love (perhaps because their mums read it to them when they were kids) but that we Americans just plain don't understand the appeal of, even if we've heard of them or--especially--tried them.

But that's just a wild guess. :)

A few (rather scattered) thoughts about Michael's post. If the vision Baltar&Caprica represent the gods of Kobol (Greek), well, that's a bit strange, isn't it, considering that Caprica is always talking about God (singular)? That's not to say that she couldn't be mistaken about her role, but considering the directness with which she operates, telling the truth about things that Gaius (or the physical Caprica) couldn't have known, she seems like a pretty direct representative of whatever divinity is out there. You're right, of course, that the Kara we see after she dies is much less self-aware. The distinction you seem to draw is that angel-Caprica/Gaius are more direct, so they're more like Greek Gods, while Kara wasn't given direct information, which is more like the Christian God. But then, if you take seriously Christian mythology as expressed in the Bible, that hasn't always been the case. Some of God's prophets were spoken to directly by God and seemed to know exactly what they were supposed to do, even if--like Baltar--they were too weak to always do so or tried to avoid their fate (Jonah as the most obvious example). So I tend to believe they were all instruments of unified divine whatever (if it doesn't want to be called God, it will just have to settle for "divine whatever").

Also, I'm not sure I buy that Cavil was really "ultimately religious." Although he sometimes played a minister, it was pretty clear that he understood that as a cynical sham. He seemed to be presented as the most consistently atheistic character. In fact, what he represented was a particular kind of atheism in the way that he viewed himself as a machine. Human beings can also view ourselves that way, as simply programmed by our genes for certain limitations (remember Cavil's ranting at Ellen about this?) and behaviors. He basically sees himself the way that many of the humans view the Cylons: machines with little or no freewill. That isn't Moore's vision of either humans or Cylons: in fact, we're basically the same. Our genetics may give us certain predispositions, but we have free will to choose what we are. Consider the Cylons as a case study: they're set up as being "identical" within a particular model, but over the course of the series, this has fallen apart, most notably with the 6s and the 8s, where their life paths have taken them down very different paths. The Cylons who DO stay identical do so because they've chosen to in one way or another, they've embraced the idea that that's what they're SUPPOSED to be (i.e. Cavil's way). I'm coming around to your basic reasoning for why Cavil kills himself, though: he doesn't believe in real creativity or growth, so he doesn't believe in his or the other Cylons' ability to rediscover resurrection (I also suspect it's something of a cop-out: wrapping up that side of the storyline on the one hand and condemning atheism--or at least that materialist-determinist [straw man:] atheism).

Going back to the question of keeping Pegasus vs. keeping Galactica, I just went back and have been watching season 3. I'd forgotten the details, but the original plan was for Lee to take Pegasus and the few remaining civilian ships and keep looking for earth while Bill took Galactica to try to rescue the people on New Caprica. Galactica was getting blown to hell in the rescue mission when Lee came charging to the rescue after all, despite being the one to argue for not putting all their eggs in one basket. He threw Pegasus into the center of the fray to draw fire from Galactica so they could jump away. I don't know that they made a conscious choice of Galactica over Pegasus so much as it just worked out that way--it became too late for Pegasus to get out and Pegasus was easier to fly with little or no crew anyway, so they abandoned Pegasus and let its momentum carry it into a collision with a basestar, destroying both.

Robin, that's the way I read it... "once there were brook trout...." Although there's something beautiful about the passage, I really don't know that it's particularly hopeful.

Robin, it's Hollywood, so chances are that we'll get a scene at the end showing the boy's future and how he goes on to save the world, or maybe the people who save him will take him to this verdant Eden where food grows in abundance and good guys are living a utopia. It wouldn't be the first time the ending of a book has been changed to make sure the ending is sufficiently happy...

Pete, the Piers Anthony series (Incarnations of Immortality) wasn't specifically about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It starts with Death, and does include War later in the series, but the other books focus on Time, Fate, Nature, Good, and Evil as sort of supernatural jobs that humans end up holding for a certain amount of time.

Terri, I think you hit the nail on the head there: the father's great love for his son has blinded him in such a way that there doesn't seem to be much point to his living. He has no goals beyond seemingly arbitrary, ill-considered ones. They go to the house he grew up in, they go to the sea. Maybe it will be better somewhere. But there's no sense that the man really believes that it will be better anywhere: he's just trying to keep his son alive (as he thinks, by keeping on the move, on the road) and innocent.

He never really teaches his son anything, except by vague example (look at some of his last advice, to "Do everything the way we did it" (278)). But, for instance, when he reasons out the existence of the cistern or finds the bunker or finds the emergency kit on the boat... he doesn't talk his son through any of those things. He seems determined to keep his son innocent, and thereby ensures that his son won't survive any longer than he does (or would have, if not for the convenient arrival of the man who represents this group).

Maybe it's impossible given what's happened to the world (whatever it was), but it seems like there's no one who's building anything, who's doing anything that's sustainable--they're all just fighting over the scraps of industrial society, looking for lost pockets of canned goods or whatever. Will the land not support food beyond things like the mushrooms we see? Or not yet, anyway?

On one level, I think the trout ending is there because McCarthy styles himself a "literary" author, and so needs to fulfill his quota of words spent being obscure and poetic, especially at a crucial point like the end of the novel.

That's no reason to dismiss it out of hand, however. I'd like to take it seriously, but at the same time I recognize that I haven't been able to come to any hard and fast conclusions for myself, so I have little thought of convincing anyone else. What follows is offered in the spirit of inquiry.

In some ways, the passage actually seems *not* hopeful. "Once there were brook trout," but no more. The patterns on their back tell "Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again." Not exactly hopeful stuff, is it? Yet it ends with "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." Is this a suggestion that man is not the measure of all things? That there's some deeper principle of life acting beyond what is obvious? I don't know.

I skipped over something else that interested me, this phrase "Maps and mazes." We see so many times the man and boy looking over the map, trying to figure out where they are and how to get to the ocean, yet by doing so they're losing themselves in the arbitrary maze made by the roads, and as the man who takes the boy at the end suggests, that's about the last place they should be. The father is so focused on his love for his son and his basic principle of keeping to the road and keeping moving that he seems never to have adequately considered where they should go and WHY. Perhaps I'm veering from where the author intended me to go, but he's vague enough that I feel pretty well justified in going just about anywhere. :)

Hannah,

Since I've read almost all of Brust's novels, I'll chime in on this one... I'm assuming that you're thinking primarily of his Vlad Taltos series and the related Khaavren Romances. These seem on the surface to be firmly in the fantasy camp, with magic, witchcraft, swordplay and the like, but peppered throughout the series are suggestions that there *might* be sci-fi justifications haunting this world. Right from the first book we get a discussion of genetics and some kind of genetic engineering by an advanced race sometime far in the past. There seems to be an awareness that they live on a planet, and although no one living on the planet seems to have any inkling of being able to get off the planet, there's a knowledge by some characters that humans aren't native to this planet, that another race of beings who also weren't native did some genetic manipulation on native species and on human beings, and pretty much ran things to their liking until a successful rebellion forced them out.

The thing is, even with this science-fictiony backdrop, I think most readers would still be strongly inclined to call these works fantasy novels because, well, they read like fantasy and there's enough that seems unexplained and magical that it feels like fantasy. But still, there's just enough there to make you question it, and even the magic is very consistent and systematic, suggesting that it just *might* have some justification.

I think Brust just does it to thumb his nose at easy classification, not because it's "really" sci-fi. As opposed to Carolyn's examples of Pern and Darkover, where the authors really want to make it absolutely clear that they're not writing fantasy, even if it feels like it sometimes.

Kristjan, I think you have a lot of good ideas. I can understand how some people just don't want to be discussion leaders, and that doesn't mean they can't suggest a good title. I should think that a nomination with an explanation should be sufficient to show one's seriousness.

I also like the idea of have a run-off to narrow down the field to 10 books before a final selection--I think it's a great idea.

Jeffrey, I really like your idea about including an argument for the book. It (theoretically) forces the person nominating it to put more thought into it and it also potentially gives us something more to go on than just name recognition, which often seems to carry the day.

Yes, that is the rub--if people throw out as many nominations as they want and leave it to the mods to fix it ("kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"?), that's asking an awful lot of the mods. On the other hand, if, as Angie suggested, we only allow one nomination per person, then we accomplish two things: 1) fewer total books for the mods to sort through and 2) more thoughtful nominations.

The need for limitation, though, isn't strictly--or even primarily?--a numbers issue, at least not in my mind. The issue as much as anything is that too many suggestions are given that don't seem to show enough forethought--they don't fit the theme, either because the person nominating it hasn't considered the theme carefully enough or hasn't considered the book carefully enough. More than a random culling of the flock to make a smaller list to vote on, what's needed is a careful selection that brings the unruly flock of suggestions in line with the theme that was selected in the first place.

I need more time! My wife and I along with another couple and another friend of ours have been trying to go through all the back episodes (for my part, I didn't start watching until late in season 2 or early in season 3, though I watched a half-hour catch-up show and my wife explained some things to get me up to speed, and my friend's wife was in about the same position). We're only in the first half of season 2 though--unless we all call in sick to work (tough since we all work at the same school!), we're never going to get caught up before Friday. And we've got webisodes to watch too?! ::sigh:: Frak me.

(But I'm still very excited for the new episodes!)

Thomas-- The fine boxed wines have made their way to America... I had one at a party about a year ago and it wasn't half bad, but I couldn't tell you what the name of it was, but all the wine snobs I know were oohing and ahhing about it.

Jerrod-- While it's certainly possible to have a poor experience with an RPG IRL, I suspect Christopher's point is that RPGs with other people DMing and playing has a higher ceiling... as you noted, console RPGs tend to get repetitive and pretty well remove the role playing aspects. Real DMs and players sometimes do that as well (more *roll* playing than *role* playing), but when you've got a good DM and you've got a party of characters who are into bringing a character to life more than just getting all sorts of cool powers and inflicting maximum damage each round of combat... well, then you've got something that a computer RPG can't compete with.

MMORPG like WoW go some distance above and beyond just a PC RPG, but still seem to have a tendency toward combat over character.

Nick, I appreciate the info on the collection and, in fact, I'd like to ask if anyone has recommendations of specific post-apocalyptic short stories, either from that collection or from elsewhere.

I'm teaching a course called "The Literature of Survival," and though the focus isn't sci-fi at all and my core texts are already set, I'd be interested in slipping a sci-fi short story or two into the class. Not all post-apocalyptic stories, of course, are survival stories, and I'm more interested at this point in those which are. Thoughts?

One possibility for finding audio books is to look to your nearest metropolitan area's libraries. From what I can tell, more and more of them are allowing you to download audio books that they have onto your computer, so even if you don't live that close to the big library, you can check out a broader selection of audio books. The one I'm most familiar with, depending on the book, allows you to listen to the book on your computer for 2 weeks and to download it to your mp3 player (sadly, *not* your iPod--I got my wife another brand of mp3 player just so we could listen to audio books), and many books allow you to burn them to CD (yes, it's a lot of CDs to burn, but they're much cheaper than actually buying the audio book). Even now that I've moved away from Providence, RI, I still frequently use its library for books. Pittsburgh, an hour from where I live, also has something like this, though I haven't used it yet.