Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Ringworld
For a long time I finished every book I started. This sometimes meant that I just stopped reading in general because the book I was "reading" wasn't very enjoyable to me, so I just avoided doing the "task" in general.
Thankfully, I eventually stopped that, and gave up reading books I didn't like. There are lots of _good_ books out there that I could read instead! An amazing discovery I assure you!
The most recent book I have failed to read is the classic sci-fi novel Ringworld by Larry Niven, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula.
And is so incredibly '70s and mysoginistic I couldn't bring myself to read most of it. I can see why it was popular, it bounces along at a pretty good pace, has some decent world building (it is part of Niven's Known Space Universe of books), aliens, a main character who presumubly the readers are supposed to identify with, and a terrible, terrible female human character.
Hey role is to be dumb (she is only 20! She doesn't know anything compared to the 200 year old male), and have sex with the main character. Or to pout and refuse to.
Some of the claims seem really ridiculous. She's never experienced pain? How? What type of messed up utopia do you live in where nothing bad has happened to you? Well, based on the ludicrous party that opens the book and where she first appears, I can only assume that she's the equivalent of the poor little rich girls of today. I assume there's some sort of human underclass that's never mentioned throughout the book (or at least what I read of it). A book about them would have been more interesting.
Oh, and she's "lucky" which is why she's on the trip. Or she's supposed to have been bred for luck, but isn't lucky. It's just kind of ridiculous to be honest.
Yeah, that's all I have to say really. I gave up a while after they got to the actual Ringworld of the title. Maybe halfway through the book?
Thankfully, I eventually stopped that, and gave up reading books I didn't like. There are lots of _good_ books out there that I could read instead! An amazing discovery I assure you!
The most recent book I have failed to read is the classic sci-fi novel Ringworld by Larry Niven, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula.
And is so incredibly '70s and mysoginistic I couldn't bring myself to read most of it. I can see why it was popular, it bounces along at a pretty good pace, has some decent world building (it is part of Niven's Known Space Universe of books), aliens, a main character who presumubly the readers are supposed to identify with, and a terrible, terrible female human character.
Hey role is to be dumb (she is only 20! She doesn't know anything compared to the 200 year old male), and have sex with the main character. Or to pout and refuse to.
Some of the claims seem really ridiculous. She's never experienced pain? How? What type of messed up utopia do you live in where nothing bad has happened to you? Well, based on the ludicrous party that opens the book and where she first appears, I can only assume that she's the equivalent of the poor little rich girls of today. I assume there's some sort of human underclass that's never mentioned throughout the book (or at least what I read of it). A book about them would have been more interesting.
Oh, and she's "lucky" which is why she's on the trip. Or she's supposed to have been bred for luck, but isn't lucky. It's just kind of ridiculous to be honest.
Yeah, that's all I have to say really. I gave up a while after they got to the actual Ringworld of the title. Maybe halfway through the book?
Labels: Books
Friday, February 20, 2009
Tomorrow
I'm afraid I'm going to burn out. Not on life or anything like that, but on the Tomorrow series of books by John Marsden.
I'm about midway through the fourth book of the series right now, and I only started them a few weeks ago. None of them are that long (I think the longest thus far has been 280 pages), but that's still quite a lot to read.
I picked up the first book in this young adult series, Tomorrow, When the War Began, at an otherwise somewhat disappointing free store just before xmas (but still, yay free store!). I'd heard the title before, but had no idea what it was about. Did I even read the back, or did I just take it to add to my towering pile of books?
To the great astonishment of everyone (or at least me) it soon got taken off the pile (I was probably procrastinating doing something else) and I began reading the story of teenaged Ellie and her friends hanging out in small town Australia. They flirt, they argue, they get mad, they make up, they make out, they worry, they cry, they're teenagers.
In the middle of a war.
Australia's been invaded by an unnamed Asian country, who want some of the luxury and resources for themselves. Ellie and her friends were out camping in the bush when the invasion happened, and they return to civilization to find everyone in town has been rounded up and held captive. They don't know what to do, and, for the first time in their lives, there's nobody to tell them.
They survive (there's seven books, of course they survive!), and became guerillas, waging their own war against the invading army. Yeah, it's somewhat ridiculous, but they don't all become Rambo*. It's done with enough skill that the things they do seem to at least be plausible, and most of what they do is just surviving. As the series progresses I can only assume that Marsden was doing more and more research into what armies, and people in war zones, actually did.
Ellie and her friends feel a lot realer than a lot of stuff aimed at kids (or teenagers or whatever). They drink, they fuck, they fuck up, and apart from Ellie (or at least that's who I presume the sequel series "The Ellie Chronicles" is about), you don't know who's going to survive. In fact, at this point I'm reasonably certain that all of her friends are going to die at some point. But while they're alive, they have personalities, and they grow and change. Frequently this growth isn't in the best of ways, as they end up killing more and more people, but the world they're living in is scary place, and I have no idea what I'd do in the same situation.
Okay, so the premise doesn't really make sense. It's never explained who's actualy invaded (China? Indonesia?), and the goal of moving a shit load of Asians to Australia doesn't work, as I'm pretty sure that the country couldn't support a population twice as large. (Am I wrong? I'm sure I read somewhere that there were increasingly frequent droughts that were making it super hard for farmers to, well, farm.) The rest of the world (except New Zealand and New Guinea), more or less ignore what's going on.
I only wish I'd found these books when I was younger, as I'm sure 14 year old me would have loved them, but I'm going to keep reading them anyway. Sure, they're a little predictable at times, but I want to find out what happens to Ellie and her friends. Plus maybe I'll find some information that'll be useful if Canada ever gets invaded.
*I find it kind of funny I make references to movies I've never seen.
------------------------
Bonus "review" of Milk (the movie):
It made me cry, but I didn't think it was that good really. Still, important historically.
I'm about midway through the fourth book of the series right now, and I only started them a few weeks ago. None of them are that long (I think the longest thus far has been 280 pages), but that's still quite a lot to read.
I picked up the first book in this young adult series, Tomorrow, When the War Began, at an otherwise somewhat disappointing free store just before xmas (but still, yay free store!). I'd heard the title before, but had no idea what it was about. Did I even read the back, or did I just take it to add to my towering pile of books?
To the great astonishment of everyone (or at least me) it soon got taken off the pile (I was probably procrastinating doing something else) and I began reading the story of teenaged Ellie and her friends hanging out in small town Australia. They flirt, they argue, they get mad, they make up, they make out, they worry, they cry, they're teenagers.
In the middle of a war.
Australia's been invaded by an unnamed Asian country, who want some of the luxury and resources for themselves. Ellie and her friends were out camping in the bush when the invasion happened, and they return to civilization to find everyone in town has been rounded up and held captive. They don't know what to do, and, for the first time in their lives, there's nobody to tell them.
They survive (there's seven books, of course they survive!), and became guerillas, waging their own war against the invading army. Yeah, it's somewhat ridiculous, but they don't all become Rambo*. It's done with enough skill that the things they do seem to at least be plausible, and most of what they do is just surviving. As the series progresses I can only assume that Marsden was doing more and more research into what armies, and people in war zones, actually did.
Ellie and her friends feel a lot realer than a lot of stuff aimed at kids (or teenagers or whatever). They drink, they fuck, they fuck up, and apart from Ellie (or at least that's who I presume the sequel series "The Ellie Chronicles" is about), you don't know who's going to survive. In fact, at this point I'm reasonably certain that all of her friends are going to die at some point. But while they're alive, they have personalities, and they grow and change. Frequently this growth isn't in the best of ways, as they end up killing more and more people, but the world they're living in is scary place, and I have no idea what I'd do in the same situation.
Okay, so the premise doesn't really make sense. It's never explained who's actualy invaded (China? Indonesia?), and the goal of moving a shit load of Asians to Australia doesn't work, as I'm pretty sure that the country couldn't support a population twice as large. (Am I wrong? I'm sure I read somewhere that there were increasingly frequent droughts that were making it super hard for farmers to, well, farm.) The rest of the world (except New Zealand and New Guinea), more or less ignore what's going on.
I only wish I'd found these books when I was younger, as I'm sure 14 year old me would have loved them, but I'm going to keep reading them anyway. Sure, they're a little predictable at times, but I want to find out what happens to Ellie and her friends. Plus maybe I'll find some information that'll be useful if Canada ever gets invaded.
*I find it kind of funny I make references to movies I've never seen.
------------------------
Bonus "review" of Milk (the movie):
It made me cry, but I didn't think it was that good really. Still, important historically.
Labels: Books
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Wastelands
I love the post-apocalypse. A lot. I read post-apocalyptic books. I read post-apocalyptic comics. I watch post-apocalyptic movies. I dress up like post-apocalyptic people.
Wastleands falls ino the first category. It's an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories that run the gamut, like all anthologies, from "pretty good" to "I didn't finish reading it." Still, the stories offer up many different versions on the same basic theme, showcasing a variety of possible apocalypses and outcomes.
Some of the apocalypses shown were caused by natural disasters, some by manmade disasters, some we don't know what happened. They're set immediately following whatever happened, to hundreds of years afterwards. Sometimes they're optimistic about how society will rebuild itself, and sometimes they think we're about a day away from reverting to complete savagery. Sometimes we have reverted to complete savagery.
So what inspired all these creators to write these stories? Why is this a type of story that people keep coming back to? Do they expect this to happen? Do they want it to happen?
For the stories set immediately in the aftermath (where "immediately" means "people alive now are still alive"), I assume there is some amount of "this is what I'd do." Or at least, "this is what I hope I do."
Or perhaps the people that write these stories hate current society and want it to collapse, Unabomber style.
Or maybe, they love our current society, but think this sort of future is inevitable. In his introduction editor John Joseph Adams says that while there was a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction written in the '80s, there wasn't as much written in the '90s. However since 2001 there's been a resurgence. This seems to imply that much post-apocalyptic ficiton is a creation of fear.
Until the Soviet Union collapsed people seemed to think that a third world war, leading to the collapse of civilization, was inevitable. In comparison t that, the '90s became an era of optimism: technology for everyone! The internet will save us all! Of course, none of it was true (even then), but in the last several years, a culture of fear has again become prevelent, leading to more stories about futures devestated by wars against "the other," and the aftermath.
Stories in Wastelands can be split into two broad categories. The pessimistic stories generally feature lone characters trying desperately to stay alive in the immediate chaos following whatever happened. They're about mobs of people banding together and destroying what's left of civilization. About society collapsing into nothing.
The optimistic, and I use this term broadly, are when there may have been a huge drop in the world's population, people might be incredibly poor, there might be barbarians at the gate (not always, or no more than certain parts of the world today at least), but there's still communities (even if maybe nobody trusts each other, and even if they're barely managing to survive), and there's usually still technology, somehow.
I suppose if you got to the technological point of self functioning robots being prevalent, they could probably run for quite a while. And those same robots could probably keep power plants and the like working, so once you get to a certain level of technlogy it's easy enough to keep it stable.
But we haven't reached the stage of self functioning robots yet, so how would we deal with an apocalypse. How soon would we revert to earlier technology? A book on that subject is Earth Abides, which is about the slow decay of technology, even when society is rebuilding itself after massive depopulation. In Earth Abides, which probably covers 60 years or so, finding food becomes the most important thing, and farming, hunting, and gathering become the most important skills for people to have, more so than reading or other things we now learn. Of course, that book was written 50 years ago, so it's perhaps not as applicable in a world today.
Still, while the current generation would probably use books and the like to learn how to farm properly (or do anything they didn't know how to do), would the second? Or would they just learn from doing? The second seems more likely. If most of your time is spent on survival, everything else becomes less important.
The idea of community becomes incredibly important. If you were in a relatively stable society, probably not that large, you'd know everyone else, and your entertainment time would probably be spent with the other people. Thus reading doesn't really become a passtime.
Sometimes post apocalypses are seen as fun. No more work. No more rent. Just hanging out with your friends and looting shops. For many people, this is pretty much the ideal life, unlikely as it may be.
But more frequently they're depressing. Threads pretty much destroyed the mode a post apocalyptic movie marathon I attended (the rest of the fare had been things like Hell Comes to Frog Town).
One thing I would like to see more of, and that I will probably end up writing myself, is the idea of explorers. In the direct aftermath, going through people's, still more or less whole. houses, and just hanging out. Most stories set in abandoned cities tend to have them looted entirely years before. I guess people hanging out in abandoned cities isn't a story in itself, just the setting for one.
I've gotten offtrack. It's an anthology. It's about the post-apocalypse. You probably already know if you want to read it.
Wastleands falls ino the first category. It's an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories that run the gamut, like all anthologies, from "pretty good" to "I didn't finish reading it." Still, the stories offer up many different versions on the same basic theme, showcasing a variety of possible apocalypses and outcomes.
Some of the apocalypses shown were caused by natural disasters, some by manmade disasters, some we don't know what happened. They're set immediately following whatever happened, to hundreds of years afterwards. Sometimes they're optimistic about how society will rebuild itself, and sometimes they think we're about a day away from reverting to complete savagery. Sometimes we have reverted to complete savagery.
So what inspired all these creators to write these stories? Why is this a type of story that people keep coming back to? Do they expect this to happen? Do they want it to happen?
For the stories set immediately in the aftermath (where "immediately" means "people alive now are still alive"), I assume there is some amount of "this is what I'd do." Or at least, "this is what I hope I do."
Or perhaps the people that write these stories hate current society and want it to collapse, Unabomber style.
Or maybe, they love our current society, but think this sort of future is inevitable. In his introduction editor John Joseph Adams says that while there was a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction written in the '80s, there wasn't as much written in the '90s. However since 2001 there's been a resurgence. This seems to imply that much post-apocalyptic ficiton is a creation of fear.
Until the Soviet Union collapsed people seemed to think that a third world war, leading to the collapse of civilization, was inevitable. In comparison t that, the '90s became an era of optimism: technology for everyone! The internet will save us all! Of course, none of it was true (even then), but in the last several years, a culture of fear has again become prevelent, leading to more stories about futures devestated by wars against "the other," and the aftermath.
Stories in Wastelands can be split into two broad categories. The pessimistic stories generally feature lone characters trying desperately to stay alive in the immediate chaos following whatever happened. They're about mobs of people banding together and destroying what's left of civilization. About society collapsing into nothing.
The optimistic, and I use this term broadly, are when there may have been a huge drop in the world's population, people might be incredibly poor, there might be barbarians at the gate (not always, or no more than certain parts of the world today at least), but there's still communities (even if maybe nobody trusts each other, and even if they're barely managing to survive), and there's usually still technology, somehow.
I suppose if you got to the technological point of self functioning robots being prevalent, they could probably run for quite a while. And those same robots could probably keep power plants and the like working, so once you get to a certain level of technlogy it's easy enough to keep it stable.
But we haven't reached the stage of self functioning robots yet, so how would we deal with an apocalypse. How soon would we revert to earlier technology? A book on that subject is Earth Abides, which is about the slow decay of technology, even when society is rebuilding itself after massive depopulation. In Earth Abides, which probably covers 60 years or so, finding food becomes the most important thing, and farming, hunting, and gathering become the most important skills for people to have, more so than reading or other things we now learn. Of course, that book was written 50 years ago, so it's perhaps not as applicable in a world today.
Still, while the current generation would probably use books and the like to learn how to farm properly (or do anything they didn't know how to do), would the second? Or would they just learn from doing? The second seems more likely. If most of your time is spent on survival, everything else becomes less important.
The idea of community becomes incredibly important. If you were in a relatively stable society, probably not that large, you'd know everyone else, and your entertainment time would probably be spent with the other people. Thus reading doesn't really become a passtime.
Sometimes post apocalypses are seen as fun. No more work. No more rent. Just hanging out with your friends and looting shops. For many people, this is pretty much the ideal life, unlikely as it may be.
But more frequently they're depressing. Threads pretty much destroyed the mode a post apocalyptic movie marathon I attended (the rest of the fare had been things like Hell Comes to Frog Town).
One thing I would like to see more of, and that I will probably end up writing myself, is the idea of explorers. In the direct aftermath, going through people's, still more or less whole. houses, and just hanging out. Most stories set in abandoned cities tend to have them looted entirely years before. I guess people hanging out in abandoned cities isn't a story in itself, just the setting for one.
I've gotten offtrack. It's an anthology. It's about the post-apocalypse. You probably already know if you want to read it.
Labels: Books, post-apocalypse
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire…And Both Lost!!!
Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire…And Both Lost!!!
by Dan Raviv
I picked this up out of the bargain books section of Chapters just before I left Canada. If it had cost me more then $5 I doubt I would have picked it up and I’m glad I didn’t pay more then that.
What’s contained in Comic Wars is in the title, it’s what happened during Marvel’s bankruptcy in the nineties and how various people tried to take over the company, only to have their way blocked by someone else. I didn’t really know that much about Marvel’s bankruptcy other then the fact that it happened, so I thought this book could tell me something about it (and I was right!).
The primary players in the book are the two tycoons mentioned in the title (Ron Perelman and Carl Icahn) plus the owner of Toybiz (Ike Perlmutter) and that company’s chief toy designer (Avi Arad). Plus a bunch of lawyers. (Actually, what’s the name for a group of lawyers? A colony of vultures? That’s not amusing at all…). There are lots and lots of lawyers in this book.
Perelman bought Marvel in the 80’s and proceeded to make a fortune by selling junk bonds based on the value of it’s stock. Then ran the company into the ground by buying loads of other companies (the purchase of Malibu Comics made an amount of sense, buying two different trading card companies?) and fueling the speculator’s market. The company files for bankruptcy and Perelman wonders if it’s better to just shut down the company and sell the assets.
Enter Carl Icahn, who’s bought up loads of the now worthless bonds in an attempt to use the small print to get a lot of shares in Marvel. Icahn also basically wants to shut the company down and sell off the assets. Clearly these are people you want in charge of Marvel.
However, based on the title of the book you can tell they both lost. Who won? Toybiz (previously a smaller, related company) merged with Marvel creating a new company. Avi Arad is the only character in the book who actually read comic books, and he wants Marvel to keep publishing comics. And to get into the movie business (which eventually worked out well). He and Perlmutter eventually manage to strike a deal with the banks (who are owed $700 million dollars by Marvel) and are able to take over the company.
Perlmutter isn’t the nicest guy either though. In fact he seems like a bit of a jerk. He wanted to put all the employees in the bullpen at Marvel on the clock and have them punch in and out. And do random drug testing. And he actually got rid of the office coffee machine. And didn’t want to pay for a Christmas party. And cut Stan Lee’s contract down to two years (it was later changed back to lifetime, and it’s not really like Stan Lee does much, but fuck! He’s Stan Lee! He created your company!). Anyway, old Ike is crazy.
The book starts off fairly well, but gets boring and repetitive after a while. I guess if you’re really into law or something you will like it, but yeah. I guess this is what law is really like “Oooh, we’ve almost got a deal! Yes this will save the company! Perfect! Hang on a second…. No it’s not going to happen after all. Please give us several more months.” I’m also not sure what lawyers do. They seem to spend a lot of time staying up all night writing documents due in the morning. They sound like university students. Except lawyers get paid disgusting amounts of money.
While there are interesting parts of it, I think the amount of legalese could have been cut down considerably. It also would have been neat if there was more input from actual comics creators and what it was like trying to publish comics during Marvel’s bankruptcy. When Raviv talks about actually comic stuff he doesn’t always get it right (ie. Image is not just Todd McFarlane’s company; Heroes Reborn was a financial success). The previous examples aren’t even that obscure, they’re things that could have been caught.
However I can’t say this is the most boring book ever. I didn’t fall asleep reading it. I managed to read it all. I didn’t hate it. It was just boring in some places. It’s worth picking up if you can get it cheap and are really into law (or alternatively, just skim it).
by Dan Raviv
I picked this up out of the bargain books section of Chapters just before I left Canada. If it had cost me more then $5 I doubt I would have picked it up and I’m glad I didn’t pay more then that.
What’s contained in Comic Wars is in the title, it’s what happened during Marvel’s bankruptcy in the nineties and how various people tried to take over the company, only to have their way blocked by someone else. I didn’t really know that much about Marvel’s bankruptcy other then the fact that it happened, so I thought this book could tell me something about it (and I was right!).
The primary players in the book are the two tycoons mentioned in the title (Ron Perelman and Carl Icahn) plus the owner of Toybiz (Ike Perlmutter) and that company’s chief toy designer (Avi Arad). Plus a bunch of lawyers. (Actually, what’s the name for a group of lawyers? A colony of vultures? That’s not amusing at all…). There are lots and lots of lawyers in this book.
Perelman bought Marvel in the 80’s and proceeded to make a fortune by selling junk bonds based on the value of it’s stock. Then ran the company into the ground by buying loads of other companies (the purchase of Malibu Comics made an amount of sense, buying two different trading card companies?) and fueling the speculator’s market. The company files for bankruptcy and Perelman wonders if it’s better to just shut down the company and sell the assets.
Enter Carl Icahn, who’s bought up loads of the now worthless bonds in an attempt to use the small print to get a lot of shares in Marvel. Icahn also basically wants to shut the company down and sell off the assets. Clearly these are people you want in charge of Marvel.
However, based on the title of the book you can tell they both lost. Who won? Toybiz (previously a smaller, related company) merged with Marvel creating a new company. Avi Arad is the only character in the book who actually read comic books, and he wants Marvel to keep publishing comics. And to get into the movie business (which eventually worked out well). He and Perlmutter eventually manage to strike a deal with the banks (who are owed $700 million dollars by Marvel) and are able to take over the company.
Perlmutter isn’t the nicest guy either though. In fact he seems like a bit of a jerk. He wanted to put all the employees in the bullpen at Marvel on the clock and have them punch in and out. And do random drug testing. And he actually got rid of the office coffee machine. And didn’t want to pay for a Christmas party. And cut Stan Lee’s contract down to two years (it was later changed back to lifetime, and it’s not really like Stan Lee does much, but fuck! He’s Stan Lee! He created your company!). Anyway, old Ike is crazy.
The book starts off fairly well, but gets boring and repetitive after a while. I guess if you’re really into law or something you will like it, but yeah. I guess this is what law is really like “Oooh, we’ve almost got a deal! Yes this will save the company! Perfect! Hang on a second…. No it’s not going to happen after all. Please give us several more months.” I’m also not sure what lawyers do. They seem to spend a lot of time staying up all night writing documents due in the morning. They sound like university students. Except lawyers get paid disgusting amounts of money.
While there are interesting parts of it, I think the amount of legalese could have been cut down considerably. It also would have been neat if there was more input from actual comics creators and what it was like trying to publish comics during Marvel’s bankruptcy. When Raviv talks about actually comic stuff he doesn’t always get it right (ie. Image is not just Todd McFarlane’s company; Heroes Reborn was a financial success). The previous examples aren’t even that obscure, they’re things that could have been caught.
However I can’t say this is the most boring book ever. I didn’t fall asleep reading it. I managed to read it all. I didn’t hate it. It was just boring in some places. It’s worth picking up if you can get it cheap and are really into law (or alternatively, just skim it).
Labels: Books
