Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science Fiction
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Brian Murphy at The Silver Key has been running something of a series of posts on realism in fantasy, and his mild objections to it. I have been commenting occasionally in mild support of this trend, because I think that the fantasy genre is very conservative and needs to have its perspective broadened and conventions…
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Flood is a disaster story of epic proportions, written by Stephen Baxter. The story follows a group of 4 friends over a 30 year period from the moment in 2012 when they make a pledge under strange circumstances to always look out for one another, as a disaster of incredible size overtakes the earth. This…
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Reading World War Z has got me thinking about a lot of different things, but the first thing I noticed was the way in which the modern Zombie tale has increasingly become a commentary on (and, generally, an endorsement of) modern public health and disease prevention principles. Of course, public health principles applied in the…
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I devoured this novel in 4 hours on the Beppu-Fukuoka return train, and I thought it was awesome. The book is an Oral History of an international zombie conflict, which starts in China and brings humanity to the edge of extinction. It is written as a series of interviews, which were intended to be incorporated…
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I started reading World War Z this morning, and so far it’s excellent but the central conceit – that it’s a factual account written in the aftermath of a zombie plague – just doesn’t hold up, because the introduction presents information so implausible that you can’t trust the credibility of the author. I mean, sure,…
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Using the idea of random character generation for WFRP from the previous post, I came up with this idea for a character created randomly for the Star Wars universe, using the WFRP 3 template. This character is a Tusken Guide, a specialist role for an elite minority of sand people. Every aspect of this character…
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NASA today reports the initial results of the Kepler mission, showing that there are potentially millions of habitable planets around stars in the vicinity of Earth. The resulting menagerie of planetary candidates reads like a Traveller or Spacemaster planet generation table – it includes planets bigger than Jupiter, one planet with the density of sytrofoam,…
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Today Crooked Timber has an interesting thread on types of science fiction movie, with lots of commenters bandying about various interpretations of different stories. My favourite is the comparison between Lord of the Rings and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (anxiety about the change in class structure after world war 1). Also, I’m not sure if I’ve…
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This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The…
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I received The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, as a christmas present, and the lazy season being as it is started reading immediately. I was initially interested and a little disappointed, but the book soon turned a corner and became an excellent and impressive read. The book is set in a medium-future post-collapse Bangkok, after…
Compromise and Conceit 