Doctor Who

I eagerly await December 1st when we will watch Doctor Who together.

As I recently was a newcomer to Doctor Who, I have watched a lot of the newer series, and I feel that it might be a little hard to be thrown into only 2 episodes. Thus, I've included the official BBC Doctor Who website in the title. A lot of the material is from the current season with a different actor than the one we will be watching playing the Doctor. However, its still got a lot of fun things to play around with.

Pandemonium

I recently came across this book on Amazon, and I wasn't sure if anyone had read or heard anything about it worth sharing. It says it is a debut novel and falls into scifi and horror genres. It is set in an America where for the past few decades demon possession has become more and more common, but the demons are something like comic book characters rather than what we normally would think of as a demon. At some point, scifi writer Philip K. Dick is possessed, and the main character has been possessed since he was a child. It sounds strange but definitely has me intrigued.

Like many, I was dissatisfied with the way that the novel ended. In response I thought that I would link you to an awesome short Scifi film: The Cathedral. It is a beautiful adaption of a 21st century short story by the Polish author Jacek Dukaj. It does not disappoint.

Paragon

Well folks, I think that's the title of my novel for this year's NaNoWriMo.
And because I'm doing a verrry science fiction story, I need you guys' help!
I'm really just having fun with this, and trying to throw in as many overused
science fiction tropes as possible... But also make a cool story out of it by throwing
in my own stuff. So far, I've got aliens, portals to other dimensions, a shapeshifter,
someone who can manipulate dreams, space pirates (kind of), a black market situation
on one of the moons of Jupiter, and the "Paragon," a mysterious power source
stronger than anything else in the known universe. My heroes are trying to stop the
Paragon from falling into the hands of an evil megalomaniac from another dimension.
What else could I possibly include? haha

It's the Little Things

Because I did not like the last few parts of River of Gods, I am choosing to ignore them. I really liked the story up until a certain point. I thought Ian McDonald did an amazing job of bringing together all the seemingly random stories. His characters were interesting (I especially liked Mr. Nandha) and even though this book is huge, it didn't feel like it took too long to read. For me,however, the book ended before it got really crazy, so I have chosen to replace memories of the actual ending with this article from cracked.com (linked in the title) about science fiction. Oh the internet.

Robonaut

Was anyone else horribly disappointed by the end of the story? What is the mysterious alien artifact that appeared in the sky? Why, it's a Boltzmann Brain. Was it put there by aliens? No, by our artificial descendants who escaped into an alternate reality where time moved backwards, and who managed to control the collapse of their universe so that all of their knowledge managed to be preserved in a giant stone of knowledge and send back to our universe (somehow, even though they're dead now and their universe IS the giant stone of knowledge). What a serious case of deus et machina. I guess that's fitting, given the title, but I feel it ruined an other wise well thought out novel.


So, in other news, I'm sure y'all know that the last shuttle launch is coming up soon. I'm personally excited that it's been delayed three weeks, that way I'll be home in Florida for the sonic boom. Apparently, they're sending a Robonaut into space this time. His name is R2 (I'm thinking he needs a friend named D2). They're going to have him do boring and dangerous things, if the testing goes well. Eventually, they might even send him to Mars.

Supergod

The aeais in River of Gods reminded me of the comic Supergod by Warren Ellis. The plot of Supergod is...mostly irrelevant to River of Gods, except that in the comic, India manages to create a living god in the form of a cloned, cyborg Krishna. Krishna-bot evolves beyond its expected parameters and exterminates a large number of Indians and then nukes Pakistan. So, both stories feature divine beings created by humans that eventually turn rogue (although in Brahma's case it's less apocalypsy). I recommend everyone reads the first issue, at least, because it's pretty interesting and it dwells on similar ideas about super/nonhuman psychology as River of Gods.

Update: River of Gods was published about five years before Supergod came out, so there is a decent chance that Ellis had read it.