It’s a creative outlet that brings me great joy- but I don’t let it take over my life, and I never make it a job. I don’t blog when I don’t feel like blogging. I don’t link to something that doesn’t interest me or that I haven’t read. (Nothing is more obvious and damning than a lack of interest.) I’ve always refused free review copies partly because I never wanted to feel the pressure of having to review a book. Adding ads to the site adds obligation to generate eyeballs, and potential smell-tests. The blog is not toil and trouble, it’s an escape from toil and trouble. So as yet, I never burned out. I kept it fun. If by protecting my joy, that means I haven’t shared or given of myself as much as I could have or as much as people expect from a weblog, or seem aloof, or I haven’t reviewed a comic book in a timely fashion, or I don’t get that book deal or get paid for blogging, or it means the night-sweat horror of a million missed links- so be it. The weblog is what it is. I do stubbornly addictively resist going a week without blogging, but if I do, so be it- you’ve always known what you’re getting, a working guy in his pajamas when he has time to blog about one of his life’s passions. I respect the audience, and try to be the consummate classy professional- like a Broadway actor or the Undertaker, when that curtain goes up, it’s A-Game time, regardless of what’s happening backstage or if the entrance pyrotechnics just gave you second-degree burns- I have never blogged about ennui with comics or blogging- but the moment I think to myself that I *must* blog today, that I owe you anything for visiting a free personal website, it’s over.

Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan
534 pages
published in 2002

Altered Carbon is Richard Morgan’s first novel. It made a strong impression, winning the Philip K. Dick Prize for best novel in 2003, as well as being optioned by Joel Silver, the sale of the movie rights enabling Morgan to become a fulltime writer. Since then Morgan has written several more novels, part of the same generation of British science fiction writers as Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I knew of him, but had not read anything of his until last year, when I read Broken Angels and was sucked in from the first page. So not for the first time I started a series in the wrong way, as that was actually the sequel to this book — not that it mattered, as all they shared was the hero, Takeshi Kovacs.

Whereas Broken Angels was a Dirty Dozen type war romp with the cynicsm turned up to eleven, Altered Carbon is more of a Chandleresque film noir story. It starts with Takeshi as amercenary on Harlan’s World being caught and killed in a police dragnet, to wake up on Earth minus one partner and forced to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, which everybody but the murder victim in question thinks is suicide. If Takeshi refuses to cooperate or fails in his task he’ll go back in storage for the next couple of centuries or so.

Read more…

But though I can fully appreciate the genius of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Deep Purple and the other hard rock pioneers, they’re not metal. These bands all fit in perfectly with the other big rock bands: the Stones, the Who, Cream and all the seventies stadion rock acts. Perfectly normal people could listen to them and go to their concerts and not be looked down upon. They weren’t metal. is metal:

And this.

Not to mention this.

Metal has always been a skeevy sausagefest sort of music, both thuggish and nerdy, listened to by the weird dorky kid with the Tolkien posters in his bedroom and the thicko failing woodshop with a habit of casual violence. It’s never been cool or top forty material, with some exceptions, yet remains popular everywhere anyway. Its image is violent, reactionary and misogynistic but apart from a few of the more loonier Christian pressure groups in the eigthies nobody ever got as outraged about it as they would get over a single fiddy cents video. And I love it.

Broken Angels
Richard Morgan
490 pages
published in 2003

Richard Morgan is a British science fiction writer, who debuted in 2002 with Altered Carbon, to which Broken Angels is a sequel. It can however be easily read on its own, considering I just did that with no trouble at all. The only thing it has in common with the earlier novel is the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs. I’d been aware of Morgan as a hot new writer, but hadn’t sampled him yet. Reviews of his work had been mixed and I hadn’t been interested enough to seek his books out. Which may have been a mistake, judging from Broken Angels.

From the reviews I’d read and the remarks made by friends who had read his novels I had gotten the impression that Morgan let his leftwing politics overwhelm his stories, while he was also accused of having a lot of unnecessary violence in his stories. I found neither of these allegations to be true in this case. There is a political undertone to Broken Angels, but certainly no dozen page rants; there’s violence, but it’s not at all reveled in the way John Barnes sometimes does. It reminded me in fact of Neal Asher, another author often accused of excessive use of violence, in that neither shy away from showing the consequences of violence, that being shot hurts and what it exactly does to a body. But where Asher’s descriptions are very organic, dripping with ichor and blood and bodily fluids, Morgan’s is very clean, sharp, bright and clinical but not at all detached. His characters feel their pain. And they get plenty of opportunities to feel this pain.

Beta Virginis is 35.5 light years from Earth. It was enveloped by your light cone 2 weeks ago.

Calculate which stars are in your personal lightcone.

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.

You can see the sole reason Liddle was refused this position was that the powers that be were afraid of his blunt honesty, not because he’s just another rightwing asshole who thinks he’s entitled to lead a leftleaning paper, or because he has a habit of posting racist comments on Millwall supporter sites (under pseudonym, natch). Title courtesy of Charlie Brooker, who described Liddle a while back as “a failed Womble who’s just been shaken awake in a shop doorway”.

Altered Carbon — Richard Morgan
Morgan’s first novel, a Chandleresque science fiction thriller.

Good Omens — Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
The Apocalypse was never so funny. Reread for the umpteenth time and still funny.

Tiger Force — Michael Sallah & Mitch Weiss
Proof that US joualists could still do investigative reporting, this is the book version of a series of articles the authors had originally written for the Toledo Blade about the specialised recon unit Tiger Force went on a rampage through Vietnam.

The Quiet War — Paul J. McAuley
McAuley’s first proper science fiction novel in years, as good or better than any of his classic works.

Black Man — Richard Morgan
Another Morgan s.f. detective novel set in a future which though only written in 2006 already feels outdated.

The other Log of Phileas Fogg — Philip José Farmer
The real story behind Jule Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

Thought y’all might like a picture of me with the Christmas gift I like the most: the shiny new Nice Hat S. gave me. Wearing it while walking through town makes me feel badass — until I trip over my own shoelaces. Again.

With the weather turning from snow to rain and back in the last two months it’s also been very handy in the not getting me wet area. No need for one of those big fuckoff umbrellas two miles in diameter that block every other fucker’s view, not to mention poke their eyes out…

Sometimes you just cannot believe what you see. Sven Kramer, the Netherlands’ latest skating giant, on track for gold on the ten kilometres, not to mention a new Olympic Record (as the guy in second place already has broken the record already) and then everything goes horribly wrong. At the point where he has to exchange the inner track for the outer one once again his coach is waiting for him to tell him he’s already almost three seconds ahead of his competitor, Sven changes and changes back again to the wrong track. The upshot? He’s disqualified and the South-Korean Lee Seung-hoon insteads wins gold. You can’t blame him, he did skate an Olympic Record as well after all, but how awful for Sven and his coach. With the television cameras lingering on them as the truth sank in, it was heart wrenching to watch them realise what the error cost Sven — Gerard Kemkers, his coach looked completely down. I’ve think we’ve all had that same sinking feeling when we made one simple mistake that fucked up something important.

Poor guys.