Dreamer Easy

Damien Keown. Buddhist Ethics: a Very Short Introduction.
Elizabeth Moon. Speed of Dark.
Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood.
Osamu Tezuka. Buddha, volumes 1 and 2.

( Books borrowed and bought )

Feminist SF, especially feminist SF set in future utopias or dystopias, sometimes handles homosexuality well and sometimes handles it badly. I'm reading The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper, and I've just come across a bit where someone explains that they routinely cure homosexuality, which, as people knew even before the apocalypse, is caused by a simple imbalance of hormones in utero. wtf?!

Why I never get anything done:

"Andy was nothing if not methodical and so he had simply looked up every book that had ever been written on such topics, and every book mentioned in those books' bibliographies, yea, even unto four of five generations; checked out all of them that were available locally; and ordered the rest from ILL."
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I'm not eligible for Interlibrary Loans any more, alas - but add in journal articles and ABE and that's basically what happens every time I get the hots for some new topic.

(This book also uses the phrase "a bad case of jangly ganglia" to describe the results of a punch in the head. "Best to leave that fancy stuff for later, and concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be a vertebrate again.")

I was thinking about that thing in Larry Niven's Known Space stories where female aliens are almost always non-sentient, and human women are a remarkable exception. Kzin females and Puppeteer females are animals, and it's hinted that the latter are eaten alive by their own offspring. I'm pretty sure there are other examples too (ETA: Yep - Thrint females are non-sentient). Where the heck did Niven get this idea? Not from nature, that's for sure. Weird.

The War of the Worlds concert RAWKED. Even the hilarious fighting machine prop, lowered from the ceiling in a moment of pure Spinal Tap; even Dick's head. Justin Hayward can still hit those high notes. Much audience appreciation of "Tracking Station 43 - Can Berra."

Before sending it off (tysolna, I still need your snail mail), I re-read three of my favourite Larry Niven stories from his anthology Neutron Star - the eponymous Hugo winner, At the Core, and perhaps my favourite Niven story, Grendel. I probably haven't read these since I was a teenager, when I was in love with Niven's "Known Space", its species and its physics and its gadgets. (More recently, I was similarly delighted by the physics of the galaxy in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep.) The stories are arguably reeeaaallly science essays, but they're written so crisply and wittily that it doesn't matter. (As a grownup used to squeaky-clean TV heroes, I'm also rather pleased by Beowulf Schaeffer's self-interest and slightly dodgy ethics. :-)

Five bits - some of which I still quote occasionally:

1. Bey! What'll I do?
2. "You would be interested in a high-paying job?" "I'd be fascinated by a high paying job."
3. Oho, said I to myself, said I. [years later I discovered this in turn quotes Gilbert and Sullivan.]
4. "My General Products hull just failed." "I beg your pardon?"
5. "I was thinking that the two of you are like a medium-sized beach ball standing next to a baseball bat."

ETA: I can't help but imagine David Tennant as the seven foot tall, skinny as a rake Schaeffer. :-)

I'm two chapters and a few pages into Pat Cadigan's Tea From An Empty Cup, but don't feel motivated to continue. Ought I?

It was, literally, a quarter of a century ago that I was traumatised by Dial Double Zero, a Ray Bradbury short story dramatised for the documentary The Story of a Writer. The doco has now been released on DVD, and last night Jon and I sat down and watched it. Twenty-five years later, that hideous inhuman voice at the other end of the telephone still had the power to make the little hairs stand up all over my body.

The DVD arrived! (Don't worry, Jon, I hugely want to re-watch it with you.) And unlike watching it at the tender age of about eighteen, I can navigate this, I know just where I am. It's an early seventies SF film, a bit like A Boy and His Dog (ETA: or A Clockwork Orange), with a large dose of late sixties / early seventies satirical whackiness a la Head. Large spaces, silences, apocalypse, and you just have to focus and keep up, it's not going to be spoon-fed to you. At eighteen I couldn't have made head nor tail of it and would only have been noticing what had been changed from the novel.

ETA: With his deep Shakespearian voice, Finch's Cornelius is like an alarming mashup between Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner and Mick Jagger.

ETA: Oh good grief, that's Graham Crowden. I knew I knew the voice.

ETA: omg Sandra Dickinson!!!!!!!!!

ETA: I think the main problem with this film is that there are a few scattered references to the world ending, but we see almost no actual apocalypsing, and in fact it's sort of forgotten by the end. The changes are mostly intelligent ones to draw the story together a bit more conventionally, bu you don't feel that the ending is really set up by the beginning - instead there's a huge exposition dump right at the finish, unconvincingly broken up by a contrived fight. Plus they left out Jerry's marriage.

I don't think I ever gave my patient readers a wrap-up of my Not Buying Stuff week. In brief, it went very well; I must have saved a fortune in takeaway food and small indulgences. My self-imposed rule about only buying fresh food not only helped use up fridge and cupboard contents, but meant we ate lots of fresh food.

I think I need another week of self-abnegation next week, after yesterday's expedition to Newtown, where I bought a duck for putting things in and Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist. Jon and I also indulged in a rather terrific Thai feed. I had choo chee tofu, one of those curries where you eat faster and faster and faster and sweat beads on your upper lip. I also had my first sauvingnon blanc, which was delicious, and made Newtown bob up and down.

I'm starting to have the uncomfortable feeling Banks enjoys writing those innovative torture scenes just a tiny little bit too much.