Vox’s posts tagged john scalzi

Last Seasons in Hell

nobody@vox.com(Hieronymus) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:13:36 +0000

I finished The Last Colony by John Scalzi. This is the third and presumably final book in the Old Man's War series. I read the first one and found it enjoyable if not very deep. Ditto with Colony - perfectly readable, with nothing memorable really. I finished it, which says something these days, but I probably won't bother with other books in the set, like Zoe's Tale and Ghost Brigades. But if you enjoyed any of them, you would almost certainly enjoy The Last Colony.

The Last Colony tells the story of John Perry and his wife Jane Sagan (a quasi clone of his first wife) and their attempts to settle a new world with a colony ship. The problem? The Conclave, a loose union of worlds allied against their Colonial Union, has declared any further expansion grounds for destruction. So Perry and Sagan have to negotiate both internal and external forces to keep everyone alive.

One thing I thought odd while reading it was realizing just how well I "know" Scalzi. I don't have any published authors as close friends, but I have been reading his Whatever blog for years and it is one of the 20 or so that I keep up with every day. Sometimes acerbic, sometimes annoying, but always entertaining, he is pretty open on his blog and so you feel like you know him. And I found that fact vaguely disconcerting for some reason. Maybe I was trying too hard to apply what I "know" about him to the characters or the writing. Just odd.

The next book I read was Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, White Herzog and "The Worst Baseball Team in History" - the 1973-1975 Texas Rangers by reporter Mike Shropshire, who covered the team during those stirring years. This is one funny book, with plenty of inside anecdotes and wild stories of baseball players, owners and reporters. He is as hard and honest on himself as he is on any player, but some of the descriptions just crack me up:

"This team is two players away from being a contender - Sandy Koufax and Babe Ruth." - Whitey Herzog
"Defensively, these guys are really substandard, but with our pitching, it really doesn't matter." - Whitey Herzog

Typical was [Whitey's] recollection of a road trip with the Yankees when general manager George Weiss got on an elevator and encountered relief pitcher Ryne Duren, a lover of the grape, barely able to stand. According to Herzog, Weiss stiffened and said, "Drunk again." To which Duren grinned a crooked grin, slapped Weiss on the back and said, "Oh yeah? Me too."

Plenty of stories of drugs, drinking and women, although according to Shropshire, the players were mostly too busy doing the other two to have as much time for the third as generally thought. A really run read of another time, in another place.

Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and "The Worst Baseball Team in History"-The 1973-1975 Texas Rangers

Mike Shropshire

The Last Colony

John Scalzi

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Con Reports...

nobody@vox.com(angie k) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:23:40 +0000

Note: I made this post on my LJ 8/26/08 at 12:45pm thus the lunch reference...

So about two weeks ago I went to this amazing thing called Armadillo Con. A science fiction literature conference in the middle of Texas? One that’s been running for 30 years and attracts some of the best writers in the field for three days of sf/f goodness? Go on, you say? I shall.

Yes, I’m writing a con report. I’m very impressed with myself for this. You see, I’m still working on writing con reports for Linucon, Tulsa Star Trek Con, the first time I went to the Johnson Space Center back in March, Ted and my wedding, the road trip we took this summer in lieu of a traditional honeymoon. Why Armadillo Con is any more important than any of these I don’t know.

Fine, before Armadillo Con here’s a short report on everything else important that I’ve done in the past four years. (Well, not EVERYTHING. But still, some important stuff.)

Linucon – October 8 – 10, 2004. Part sci-fi literature con, part cosplay con, part Linux and computer con, part sf/f fandom con and totally awesome. When I wasn’t attending panels or buying the RPG version of Munchkin in the dealer room or staring in awe and respect at Jay Maynard (the Tron Guy) I spent three days trailing Wil Wheaton, scaring him with stories of my teenage fandom and having him sign every piece of memorabilia that I’d been collecting for years. He was gracious, funny, and awesome, at least up until the point two weeks later at the Dallas Comic Con where he enthusiastically shook my mother’s hand and called me “a great kid.” At 23 all I wanted to do was die and/or punch him hard. I kid, I kid. He’s still gracious, funny and awesome even though he called me a “kid.” Oh, and for a day I walked around dressed as Frodo. I won a costume award meaning I got a little ribbon for my name badge.

Tulsa Star Trek Con – June 6 – 8, 2008. Ted and I initially went because Wil Wheaton was going to be there but when he had to cancel we decided to go anyway. I’m glad we did. Barbara March and Gwynyth Walsh (the Duras sisters)were HILARIOUS, Adam Baldwin was dreamy, Nichele Nichols was fantastic, and Walter Koenig was delightfully just a little curmudgeonly. I had Nichele sign my copy of her autobiography and told her how important it was to me growing up. (It was important. Seeing as I had NO African American role models in my real life it was important to me to read her story and find out what life was like in the middle of the 20^th century for people who looked like me. It helped me develop a better sense of history. Of course, I also read George Takei’s and Leonard Nimoy’s autobiographies when I was a kid and those, too, affected me. I believe the joys and pains of each of America’s cultures ought to be shared and understood by each other American culture. I digress.) I also had Walter sign his autobiography. I foolishly mentioned that I hadn’t read his autobiography but had read the others (even Shatner’s). He grumped at me if I was going to read it now. I said, yes, of course, and mentally told him to chill out – the library when I was a kid didn’t have a copy of his book and I never knew he’d written one. Mr. Koenig was probably my favorite part of the con. He wore the same jeans every day of the con (or pairs that looked identical) and was the exactly the opposite of “a big star”. Very nice and approachable. Of the goodies I picked up my favorites are the classic Star Trek RPG, the TNG bridge playset (for all my action figures! w00t!), and the handmade mobile emitter (although I don’t know where it is now.) Ted bought me a Wesley Crusher decortative plate but he did it very deceptively. But that’s a story for later. Oh, and I shelled out $50 to get my official picture taken with Nichelle and Walter. I was a big dork.

Wedding – June 19, 2008. It was stressful. I’m glad it’s over. My dress rocks. I’m wearing it to TRF and Scarborough Fair for the next decade.

Honeymoon – June 28 – July 14, 2008 McDonald Observatory and the VLA rocked. There’s not much there to talk about if you’ve not been there or aren’t a science geek enough to say, “Radio telescopes? Tres awesome!” I twittered a lot on the honeymoon so if you caught that then you caught the entire trip through Roswell. We listened to World War Z (Ted remarked that Max Brooks sounds EXACTLY like Wil Wheaton when he reads. I hadn’t noticed until he said something but after that I couldn’t NOT hear Wil’s voice in Max’s. I shook my fist at Ted for that one. It was entirely distracting. But the book ROCKS. Go buy it.), Old Man’s War (during which we had to stop to have a half hour conversation about skip drives and why John Scalzi is our new blog crush), and Anansi Boys (which we agreed was hilarious because the inimitable Neil Gaiman can turn a phrase like no one else we’ve ever read. It’s hard to know if we’re part of Wheaton’s geek army, Scalzi’s bacon wielding cat army, or Gaiman’s black tshirt brigade. Perhaps all three.). The Star Trek Experience is another post in and of itself but I spent a lot of time going, “Coooool!” Spamalot made me laugh out loud and we got commorative plastic grails. The world’s largest thermometer in Baker, CA was disappointing but the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and assorted other national parks we drove through weren’t. Roswell was only amusing because there was a UFO convention going on and we happened to go to the musuem right when Keir Dullea (Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey) was giving his talk. We dropped $50 on an autographed picture of him (that Gary Lockwood has also signed) because we’re geeks like that. Then we went to the Houston Space Center, which was very much like the last time we went except we went on a special tour that took us through the original mission control. I nearly fainted due to NASA geek glee. We also got to see the astronauts doing some underwater training in the big pool and watched some live Mission Control work and then a practice run for a different launch. Very cool. Pictures will be going to Flickr as soon as I buy a Pro account.

Johnson Space Center – March 2008. Um, yeah, it’s pretty cool. They have full replica versions of the space shuttle cock pit and Sky Lab. It’s informative and fun. Rocket park is terribly fun. There are no rides but there IS the only remaining Saturn 5 rocket. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

What was this post about again? Oh, right, ArmadilloCon. You know, I’m going to go make lunch. I’ll post about ArmadilloCon just a bit later.

Cheers!

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Perpetual-Tasking

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:43:08 +0000

Crackberry

In the American Geek column of Newsweek (July 21, 2008), N'Gai Croal brings the "crackberry" commentary to a new, philosophical level when he ties our constant use of PDAs to Aristotle's famous maxim, "Nature abhors a vacuum."

So far from seeking new levels of productivity, Croal confesses, "even the work I did on my PDA was a way of filling the void with some form of electronic activity."

This isn't multitasking, Croal says. It is a new form of "mobile perpetual tasking" where "moments of spare time are steadily filled in by constant communication."

This was poignant after returning from a vacation in the New Hampshire wildlands, where neither I nor my wife had any cell-phone connectivity. Our closest "option" was a rotary-dial phone in our camphouse.

In fact, the closest "berry" I had was cracking open an ancient recipe for blueberry jam, which I made with baskets-full of fresh blueberries from the woods in which we stayed.

I went four straight days without any email, internet, or cell-phone access. On the fifth day (hear the reverberating tones of Genesis chapter one), I drove twenty minutes into town where I finally "plugged in" again.

As I sat drinking a hot cup of coffee, I couldn't tell which was more stimulating: the caffeine or the e-universe?

Making things more interesting, the "novels" I had chosen to read on vacation was the science fiction trilogy by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony).

In these well-written books (but not for kiddies), Scalzi paints a compelling, if brief, overview of the future multi-verse in which people's PDAs are basically hardwired, and then, genetically and organically "soft-wired" into the brain itself.

At one point in the series an alien race figures out how to "turn off" these brain-based PDAs and the human fighter species are rendered practically helpless.

Besides being great reading, and entertaining, Scalzi's future vision has one obvious present-day implication for all perpetual-taskers like Croal and myself: shut the thing off and find out if you still know how to sabbath. I did, I do, and I'll do it again, too!

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Free Words

nobody@vox.com(Hieronymus) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:52:55 +0000

Your free book for today is The Word of Mouth Manual, Vol. II and can be found via Seth Godin's blog post, What Dave just did. It's a book about how to guide word of mouth, a concept that is also slightly oxymoronic, isn't it? Very nicely written though. It might sound like it is just for marketeers, but truly, don't us saps who are getting marketed to deserve to know what is going on behind the screens?

And another free book for you, this time it is Lewis Shiner's Black & White, about civil rights, race relations and progress inn Durham North Carolina. You can find it here.

And, to make it 3-fer, a shareware story by the inimitable John Scalzi. Called How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story , it works just like shareware software - you download the story for free and pay what you think it is worth. Even better, half the proceeds go to the Lupus Foundation of America. You can find the post about it here. I downloaded it, but haven't read it yet.

Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking

Old Man's War

Black & White

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