I'm reading a collection of Draco Tavern stories and Fleet of Worlds. Some of the stories are recent -- 2000, 2006. They still seem to have the old touch, apart from snarky comments about Iraqis, a "we try to prevent those" from a character in response to a list of sexual perversions, including male-male attraction, and Rich Schumann thinking there are 1e20 cells in the human brain.

Fleet of Worlds seems nice so far. There was a nice touch of modern AI/data mining applied to translation of tapped video. One might wonder why the puppeteers wouldn't think of that. One is then answered, as Nessus connects language to intelligence, and then one is invited to imagine what the puppeteers make of AI. Yeah. Pierson's puppeteers are like the epitome of "Safe-Tech".

I went on a shopping spree recently and bought these two much-recommended (on rec.arts.sf.written, where the first version of this review appeared) and hard-to-find books.

I was introduced to the works of Hodgell by my freshman roommate in college. I don't remember the details, but he raved about God Stalk, while noting she was hard to find. Somehow I got a copy -- Spectre library? used bookstore? -- and read it. I think the first time through, I enjoyed it, but wasn't blown away. But then, for some reason, I re-read it.

After which I had to find a copy of Dark of the Moon, and found out that she was being published by Hypatia Press (some guy in northern California) in fancy expensive editions with nice color plates of her art, and I got sets for myself and Spectre -- the first two books, the third Seeker's Mask which first saw print in fancyedition, plus her short story collection Blood and Ivory. I also found and would snatch up copies of the paperbacks, and lend God Stalk out to lots of friends, who generally enjoyed it though without being addicted. I gave a couple of my paperbacks to two friends, as part of their set of wedding presents. It's the book I've lent out or recommended the most, though McKinley's Sunshine is getting up there.

Well, Hypatia went out of business, but another small publisher, Meisha Merlin, picked her up, printing in cheaper omnibus editions (Dark of the Gods) and an expanded short story book. MM had a whole stable of small-time authors, like the Liaden/Korval books of Lee and Miller, another cult. MM also printed the fourth novel, To Ride A Rathorn -- one novel per publisher.

Then they went out of business. The moon was draped in shadows. Though I note their website doesn't look dead.

Then Baen came! Available as Webscriptions since April, and word now is that they've bought her next book, and will be printing the others, on real paper. I see they've taken in Lee and Miller as well. And The Black Throne, the Zelazny/Saberhagen/Edgar Allen Poe book. Though A Night in the Lonesome October seems to be really out of print, which is very sad.

At any rate, thank you, Baen Books.

Bloomingtonians who want to borrow my Hodgells can.

Yesterday I read Maelstrom, by Peter Watts, the sequel to Starfish and still about the Little Bug That Could, Far Far Too Well. Like Andromeda Strain with references and a bunch of other science, like quantum consciousness (cough) and neurohacking, and a world both advanced and falling into ecological disaster, such that North American can't think of anything more productive ot do with 40 million Indian ecological refugees than to fence them up in Oregon and throw free food with antidepressants at them. Also where I have no idea how the place is governed: governments get mentioned by name but all the decisions seem to be taken by some vaguely accountable crisis management agency, with the word "corporate" thrown around a lot. But despite all that it was a good and fun read, if you don't mind the general darkness of Watts.

Also yesterday, a terraforming thread included someone mentioning indoor ski and surf resorts. So I went googling on [indoor ski resort] and [indoor surf resort] and [indoor beach]. Whee! Such things exist! Dubai's got a big indoor ski resort, along with an underwater hotel (maybe under construction, but some exist elsewhere, at less luxurious levels) and artificial islands. Indoor surf's out there, and Japan and Germany have indoor beaches. Germany's is the biggest freestanding building in the world, a converted zeppelin hangar, at 6.6 hectares. Japan's is 300 meters from a natural beach, which sounds silly until you remember "winter" and "Pacific ocean temperatures at latitudes which have winter". The anime Ouran Host Club had a beach episode at an indoors tropical resort, which I thought was cool fiction but might have been based on the real thing.

All that fascinates me because I *like* the idea of weather and climate control, and if you can't control the planet then, well, control your own. I was charmed to learn of the climate control (heating *and* cooling) termites and honeybees do for their mounds and hives. And while I love the ideas of Jane Jacobs and would pick city over mall, I also think most cities would be improved by a smart roof.

Which (smart matter) leads to today's book, Hacking Matter by Wil McCarthy. Something I'd known about for a while, and the ideas weren't too new. The high level idea is about programmable matter, matter whose properties and functions you can change through simple information. An LCD screen is a specialized form of such, as is, at a crude scale, those advertising billboards which change displays through mechanically rotating their component pixels. Something similar could be done on houses, with a surface composed of triangular pieces with white, gray, and black sides, and rotating those to get a desired reflectivity.

But McCarthy isn't actually talking at such an abstract level; instead he talks about quantum dots and artificial atoms. A qdot is a block of doped semicondutor such that electrons can't get in and out of it easily; also it's small, so the electrons are confined on the scale of an atom. But there's no nucleus, just walls, and you can control the shape of those. Also, you can pump electrons in and out of it. The electron configuration is what causes the chemical, optical, electrical, thermal, luminous and magnetic properies of matter, so by building lots of qdots on a surface, or in a solid, with associated control electrodes, you can potentially control all those properies at will, with a block of silicon changing from being transparent and insulating like glass to reflective and conductive like silver (or, more realistically, an otherwise impossible silver-silicon alloy with the mass of silicon), or shining like an LED, or...

Mass isn't controllable, and there'd be limitations, especially on chemistry and material strength due to the substrate. But you could probably still do some fun catalytic chemistry, and he has a chapter on what a smart house built out of this stuff could be like, with the building changing thermal and optical properties to manage heat. Black in the early morning, to absorb heat and store electricity, transparent panes later when the people get up, reflective at high noon after the capacitors are full, though still black in the shade so as to dump heat. If a refrigerator is part of an outside wall, the section of wall can be conductive in the winter to use the outside to cool off, while insulating and a (silent!) heat pump in the summer. The foundation can exchange heat with the ground, too. By his numbers 3/4 of the energy use of a US household is in heating and cooling things, so this is actually worth all the effort. Which isn't much effort if the stuff can be build cheaply enough; the various changes described are easily automatable.

He does note a drawback of all that: it may actually be antisocial en masse. Yes, it is saving energy, but it can also lead to a pedestrian walking among black or silver buildings, all optimized for stealing or dumping heat... stealing from or dumping into the same space the pedestrian is walking in. Ordinances might control how efficient buildings can be, or at least mandate that tall buildings only dump heat from their upper levels. But it gave me a vision of a gritty cyberpunk techno-noir feel: an unzoned city where the buildings wored to their full selfish potential, and were all mixes of black and chrome for good, functional, reasons.

Of course, if the city managed its climate collectively, via a roof and such, the problem wouldn't even come up. :)

Another cyberpunkish thing was, well. There are magneto-rheological and electro-rheological properies, which simplistically mean you can apply a magnetic or electric field and the material gets stronger. Powered toughness. So if you could sprinkle the right artificial atoms into someone's skin, balanced between not looking weird normally but still being functional, they might be able to turn on the power and suddenly have really tough skin. Instant HIT Mark!

"When technology looks like magic, the world itself becomes a fairy tale."

The grapevine tells me that Meisha Merlin, publisher of P.C. Hodgell one of my favorite fantasy authors, is going out of business.  Orphaned again!  But Baen is picking her up as e-books.

Hmm, I don't actually have a Hodgellian or God Stalk userpic.

One of the things I liked about the show Firefly was how aggressively soft it was. I'm not sure if it was deliberate, but the effect for me, of the ambiguity between system and galaxy, of the careful avoidance of any numerical distance, speed, or often even travel times, was of a cultivated "there are places and a ship that goes between them, enough said". The highlight was when Inara asked how fast the shuttle went and Mal said "oh, standard shuttle". I figure, if you're not going to try to get the numbers right, might as well toss them out and not embarrass yourself by faking it. (Especially for a writer whose age for Spike varied from "less than 200" to "120".)

So, I just read Keith DeCandido's novelization of the movie Serenity. I could say that the broken English favored by Whedon's protagonists turns out to be cuter to hear than to read. I could say that while there weren't major revelations (cf. Book) there were nice added touches, though I wouldn't want to be pressed as to what they were, apart from a hint as to how Mal could be really sure Mr. Universe was a trap. Oh, and we learned how Wash knew Mr. Universe, and how the latter got his own moon; that was nice.

But what really prompted this was when they leave Miranda, and the now-sane River says that they can easily reach Mr. Universe's moon, since it's 367,000 miles away and they can reach that at full burn in four hours.

That distance is on the order of the Earth to the Moon. Miranda is supposed to be in the outer outer [sic] system, completely overlooked by the telescopes (these people *have* telescopes, right?) people might have. This doesn't work!

The speed is 40 km/s, which is better than we can do right now and not too bad, though not great either for distances in the outskirts of a system. Even for inner system it's giving you week travel times and that's assuming going in a straight line and ignoring orbital mechanics and delta-vee. We'll also ignore "fuel" and what max speed could mean in space without a fuel constraint.

And at some point Zoe mentions Quadrants and I wanted to scream "planets MOVE! And not in synchronized fashions!" Though given how slowly outer system bodies move, a quadrant might almost make sense for a while.

There's a reason FTL is popular in ScF. Lots of stories are hard to work otherwise.

I still love the show, but it ain't for the science. (Though I'll take that silence in space. And the guns, too.)

In other news, Lady of Mazes was pretty neat. But it's late.

What do we mean by significant? I dunno; let's change the question! What's most influential? Well, influential on whom: giving lots of readers some happiness, giving a few readers lots and lots of happiness, changing the lives of lots of readers, changing the way they read books, changing the way people write books, inspiring lots of games, being arbitrarily required for proper geek culture... anything else? That's already plenty of possibilities; how to weight them? I'll ignore that question and zoom ahead, with a revealed bias toward changing lives and influencing authors.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien -- this hits them all except maybe changing lives, and even that somewhat -- people thinking they're hobbits, people being opened to geekdom... superbig in the 1960s, I've heard. "Frodo Lives!" Definitely big on games and changing writers.

Ordering after this point is kind of arbitrary.

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams -- definitely fun, but I think the mindchanging aspect is more significant for a lot of people; at Caltech it seemed everyone had read it, even those you wouldn't expect it to, and old professors would at least have heard of the jokes. Shares some vague "British humor" with Monty Python and Terry Pratchett but I don't know about direct lines of influence.
3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling -- allegedly it made a zillion kids read big books, and has spawned some kid's fantasy knockoff genre. Did the Hugos start going to fantasy books with Harry Potter?
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein -- I'm not a fan but it's often described as Heinlein almost starting a religion by accident, and I know someone who'd started a "nest" in college because of it. Definitely big on changing people's lives -- at least it's not Ayn Rand.
5. H. P. Lovecraft in general
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson -- that whole cyberpunk movement. Vinge was there first in some ways but AFAIK Gibson caused the authors and the games.
7, Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice -- see HPL and Gibson; if you spawn your own genre, you're influential.
8. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock -- I think has had a big impact on games, and maybe fantasy, and Gaiman had that autobiographical story "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock"
9. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks -- allegedly this catalyzed all those Tolkien imitators and Extruded Fantasy Product.
10. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card -- Is it that influential? Well, Coyu notes that Card has high sales, and seems to be a favorite of English classes dabbling in SF.

There's probably more which could be said, including the Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein thing in setting up the field, or getting lots of people readng and writing SF, plus Doc Smith's space opera -- but I don't want to spend more time on this, let someone else take up the challenge.

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

Well, that's the meme.  I'm not sure I hate much of the ones I've read, but I've liked some more than others.  One * for a positive impression, at least, none for "meh".  Standard comment about disagreeing with the list (which IIRC was based on ideas of "influence", not just quality.)   No Cherryh, no *Vinge* excuse me but the Singularity is damn influential, like it or not.  I don't know if Bujold or Brust are significant.  Good, yes.  4x Hugo-winning, yes...

I'd never really looked at the plethora of blurbs on this before.  Most are from newspapers, but the few from named people are hits.

"A gripping, funny, page-turning, pretty much perfect work of magical literature that exists more or less at the unlikely crossroads of Chocolat, Interview with the Vampire, Misery, and the tale of Beauty and the Beast."
 -- Neil Gaiman

"Before reading Sunshine, I had no idea blood and dessert could go together so well."
 -- Amber Benson, aka "Tara"

swan_tower describes the book much as I would, though I'd add something about the alternate universeness, the Liberty Wars and Albion and swear words such as spartan, thor, odin, and carthaginian, alongside "gods and angels", fallen angels, and Michaelmas.  Sherlock Holmes and Gormenghast still got written, though.  And triffids are real.  The other things is that while I've tended to say "best vampire novel I've read" I wonder if it's at all fair to call it a vampire novel.  It has vampires, certainly, but it's not exactly Anne Rice and not entirely Laurell Hamilton, either.  One could call it a magic novel, with a reluctant magician, who happens to have to vampires dominating her story.

Nazis, Russkies, mobsters and the U.S. Army all want a UFO unearthed from the ice—but what does it want?

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue433/books.html

Started it last night. Living up to promise so far.

(Later)
Finished it tonight. Lived up to promise. And it's a short book too, unlike many published in these days of word processing programs and no editors. Only 219 pages!

New icon stolen from an editor of the Atlas Games (Ars Magica) forums.