Dan > Recent Status Updates

Those ape chapters were pretty weird, but I guess I knew they would be going into it. Not sure how much I like this so far, but it’s an integral book to my July focus on old sci-fi—can’t very well skip this, of all things.

Clarke had to remind us he’s white man from the twentieth century: Norton is talking about what a humanitarian Captain Cook was to the “often hostile savages in the new lands he discovered.”

Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism his his story of puberty rites in late-twentieth-century Beverly Hills.”

LMAO in 1973 Arthur Clarke predicted a scientist who loves Beverly Hills 90210

This guy cannot write kids.

Everyone on Earth speaking English being a sign of sign that the world is a utopia: Clarke’s 1950s is showing.

“The demonstration lasted thirty minutes. It was sufficient; the next day the government of South Africa announced that full civil rights would be restored to the white minority.”

Oh come ON, Clarke.

This book is really fun and so different from the others I’ve read by Heinlein that I can hardly believe it’s the same author.

“Aside from a cold appreciation of my own genius I felt that I was a modest man.”

I love this narrator already; I’m thinking this will be a good one.

Beginning to be a bit of a slog: I find the ground fighting and dogfights less interesting than anything that takes place on the actual ship, but my bigger problem right now is I’m waiting for this book to do something creative. We’ve all read about one-dimensional bug aliens before, we’ve all seen America in Space, etc. I’m waiting for something novel to happen.

This author’s pretty good with military jargon, but he just had a corporal call a gunnery sergeant sarge instead of gunny.

Shocked they let Milla go on the away mission; no way she’s more of a help than a hindrance down there.

Enough with the pontificating—I’m really into military stories, but I have little patience for characters giving speeches about what it means to be a solider. Also, I really hope there won’t be a romance angle with Stephanos and Milla, but I expect there will be.

If Baley wants to test if Daneel is equipped with the First Law, why doesn’t he just try to punch himself in the face and see if Daneel stops him?

I’ve avoided Asimov because I just don’t care about robots, but I find myself really liking Daneel. Reminds me of Data.

Lije sure seems like an idiot

Not sure I like reading how 8 billion people is when Earth really started to go to shit—just yesterday, for unrelated reasons, I looked up the current population and found we broke 8 billion not long ago. So I get points for timing, I guess.

“Computer, adjust translation matrix to include Asian inflection coding as well as the European Romance languages.”

Asian. Come on, bro; there are 2300 languages on that continent.

I’m having fun with this so far, just a good old space opera. But it’s driving me crazy that the crew is often saying Yes, sir when they should be saying Aye, sir.

A little bummed it’s the Western world vs. the Eastern world and the Western side is so much ahead that they have FTL travel. Pretty old hat, and maybe Trek spoiled me, but I much prefer a united Earth is my space operas. But the writing is fine so far and it has good reviews, so this isn’t enough to turn me off.

“‘Now as I see it, this is a frontier society and any man old enough to fight is a man and must be treated as such—and any girl old enough to cook and tend babies in an adult, too.’” Fucking gross, Heinlein.

And we’ve hit the good old Heinlein sexism. I think I prefer his books where women are nonexistent because then I don’t have to read gross comments

This is cute so far. More juvenile than Heinlein’s similar Space Cadet, but a little more sophisticated than Tom Corbett.

I usually avoid books about gay men not written by gay men, but this has a boarding school and WWI, so I gotta at least give it a shot.