I’m told that today is the first ‘official’ day of Spring; the weather here in Velcro City decided to jump the gun by a few days, because from Monday through to now, it’s been clear blue skies and fresh air – and all the more blissful for that. The sort of weather, in fact, that makes me remember that this town isn’t all bad…

After all, not all city folk can cycle down to the beach in a matter of minutes. That said, I wouldn’t want to be out sunbathing like some people are at the moment. It’s not quite warm enough yet.

Stuff

Well, it’s been a few weeks since we last had an instalment of FPB, and this is going to be another truncated one. My schedule has become a lot more randomised since I went full-time freelance, partly by necessity and partly by opportunity; what this means in real terms is that I’m not always here to knock out a full post on Friday afternoon, and when I am I may not have the amount of time I’d like.

Which means that I may have to reassess my approach to posting on VCTB, and start scattering stuff out in smaller pieces instead of dumping a week of my life at a time; as much as I’d hate to see it go, I don’t know if Friday Photo Blogging can survive the transition as a regular weekly occurrence.

But that’s not too bad; I console myself with the fact that I can’t post because I’m too damned busy, which is good for me and good for you, the reader (who, one assumes, would be even more bored than usual were I to make daily posts on how I wasn’t doing anything much at all). Work to do, people and bands to see… like Japanese post-rock stalwarts Mono, for example, who are the reason I’ll be heading out of town by the time this post goes live. There’ll be a review at TDP, of course, where we’re back to daily review output once again thanks to my growing little clade of reviewers.

(Oh, and if you’ve been pining for some Album of the Week advice, then I suggest you try Pure Reason Revolution’s Amor Vincit Omnia. I can’t be sure you’ll like it (in fact, I’m not entirely sure I like it), but it’s an impressive and ambitious piece of work that updates ELP/Yes-era prog for a modern audience. Trite lyrics, but staggering vocal melodies. Go listen to Pure Reason Revolution on Last FM, because MySpace blows.)

Books and magazines seen

High time I caught up on incoming materials, as there’s quite a stack developing. Magazine-wise, we have Foundation #103 and Interzone #221, the latter coming with yet another knock-out piece of cover art:

Then there’s the books. I don’t think the Pyr edition of Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days collection has been mentioned here yet (though mentioning it on Twitter aroused a fair amount of jealousy); I’ve already read it, and need to bash out a review some time fairly soon. But in summary: excellent, well worth your money.

Then there’s the second novel from Chris Beckett, Marcher, which I’m greatly looking forward to reading, and there’s Bruce Sterling‘s latest, The Caryatids, which I splashed out on in hardcover and am about a third of the way through at the moment.

The added bonus was a copy of Gonzo, the oral history of Hunter S Thompson assembled by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour.

Comprising entirely of interview snippets from Thompson’s friends, family, colleagues and more, it paints a different picture of the man behind the legend. Possibly more notably, it paints a much kinder picture of Wenner than Thompson ever did in his own writing…

Coda

Well, there you go – a bit minimal for an FPB, but at least there’s something here, eh? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a gig to get ready for…

Well, probably not, but today it’s all blues skies and fresh air outdoors, and my lily has the first of its flowers in full bloom:

That’s springy enough for me. Or it will be until the next dismal overcast Monday rolls round, when I will curse the Earth’s axial tilt and scowl at the world through closed windows… but until then, yay!

Well, y’all get another episode of truncated ramblings today; my girlfriend is visiting for the weekend, and for some strange reason she’s not too keen on watching me batter out the inconsequentia of my life on the interwebs when we could be out enjoying the clement weather^[1].

But who am I to argue? After all, she just bought me The Chili Lover’s Cookbook, which is not only a wondrous gift of great puissance but a sign she knows me perhaps a little too well. Given that books and chilis are two of the most awesome things in the world, a book about chilis (and the correct usage thereof) is an item of great justice.

Suffice to say it’s been a busy week with its ups and downs, and that all is going well. While we’re talking about books, though, I’ll just list this week’s acquisitions, which are unusually numerous. In addition to final versions of Michael Cobley’s Seeds of Earth and Kay Kenyon’s City Without End (the latter in hardback – woohoo!), we have a new arrival in the shape of Tony Ballantyne’s Twisted Metal, which surely deserves some sort of award for its press release blurb: “In a world of intelligent robots who seem to have forgotten their own distant past, it is a time for war…”^[2]

Straight out of the Hollywood trailer playbook, eh? You can just imagine the guttural voice-over guy giving it his best clenched-fist-of-Conan bit. Looks like it could be an interesting read though, and has a cover to grab the eye of the avid mecha-war gamer:

Next is This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams, which appears to be basically similar to Charlie Stross’ Halting State, if only in theme – it’s a technothriller about social networking and metaverse games, in other words. If it’s as good a read as Implied Spaces was, I’m sure it’ll be a corker.

Bland cover, though. Thriller marketing, I guess.

The nice people at Penguin are reissuing some more classics, and they’ve re-done John Christopher‘s cozy catastrophe The Death of Grass. Couldn’t make a book look a lot less sf-nal and a lot more literary, could you?

And finally a special mention for a book I ordered late last year (after Justin and I attended that lecture before the BSFA festivities up in the Big Smoke) – The Scientific Way of Warfare by Antoine Bousquet:

That’s going to make a bee-line for the top of the TBR pile, partly because I think it’ll be swift read, but also because everything Bousquet was talking about has only seemed to increase inrelevance in the last few months. And what a great cover!

Right, that’s the book porn sorted, so I’ll bid you adieu – I’ve doing the ‘meet the parents’ thing, so I’d better have my yearly bath.

Have a great weekend, people. Laters!

[ ¹ - I'll win her over eventually. Either that or she'll realise she's going out with an incorrigable geek and take the honourable way out. ]

[ ² - Seriously, sf publishing houses - hire someone who knows a bit more about the conventions of the genre to write these things. Sure, you want to sell it, but you can do that without sounding daft and/or desperate. I know this guy who could do that sort of thing, as it happens... ]

Futuristic fiction sometimes raids the past for characters, instead of making up totally new ones. Continue reading “Spring-Heeled Jack”