Smithology

At the end of my previous E. E. Smith post, I asked what people thought might have changed in sci-fi in the last eighty years (even though it’s really only been 60 years). Here’s a few observations (just from the opening chapters of Triplanetary):

• Smith seems to almost have a sense of humour about killing off his heroes in these stories. The chapters are a backstory to the evolution of humanity into the way it is in the rest of the series so it’s all big picture stuff but still, this is from the end of a heroic chapter where the good guys have won and you’re expecting a celebratory paragraph:

And such is the violence of nuclear fission ; so utterly incomprehensible is its speed, that Theodore K. Dawson* died without realizing that anything whatever was happening to his ship or to him.

Is that black humour and or just plain bleak?

• The analogue technology is so out of date, it’s back in fashion, e.g. In a futuristic battle scene, the commander is winding levers and entering numbers from his calculator into another computer in order to guide anti-missile missiles! Smith even narrates that once the calculating machines are done, the speed and agility of humans is needed to finish the job! I think he’d be blown away (haha I punned) to see the speed and agility not to mention the cold viscousness of today’s automated weapons.

• Likewise the social situations of the characters, i.e. the women faint at the mention of anything not related to domestic activity and the men have to catch them and settle them down before heading off to save the world (and then get blown up). There are no gay or effeminate men or even men who feel anything apart from a sense of duty for their country and a strong work ethic. Workplaces may as well be battlegrounds or maybe a little world where you gather an army and lay waste to your enemies using corporate manoeuvring and pizzaz (and then get fired for being too honest).

* changed the name so that you won’t read the real one and know that he dies (if you even bother reading them now that I’ve spoiled them so well)

Uncategorized

In this episode: Title sequence with music from John Coltrane, Sol talks about where he likes to drive in daddy’s car and Matt still hasn’t had a haircut.

[tags]cars, children, fatherhood, matt and sols favourite things, sol[/tags]

Uncategorized matt and sols favourite things

My mum dropped around a box of dusty old books that she was getting rid of some months back and amongst them was a set of the Lensman series of science fiction books be E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith. The back cover of the first book compares itself to Asimov’s Foundation series and given the seventies art-work, I wrote these books off in my mind as some trashy seventies gibberish where a Mills and Boon writer had tried to branch out to a new audience or something.

Having finished watching “Flight of the Conchords” the other night and not having been to Pulp Fiction (my favourite bookshop) for some time, I picked up the first of the Lensmen novels and began reading. As I suspected it was boring, third person abstract stuff about some galaxies colliding and minds floating in space etc… the word ‘millions’ being mentioned a lot and tedious descriptions of planetary formations and an almost ridiculous set-up of the ‘bad’ guys being unfeeling ancient amoeba’s from another dimension.

But when I woke up this morning, I had a niggling feeling that there had been quite a bit more intelligence behind the story than I had first summised and I wondered if I’d judged it too harshly before even opening it. For example, C. J. Cherryh’s book Foreigner also starts off with a tedious description of some interstellar space craft getting lost and spanning generations of culture in order to manufacture two ‘races’ of people on the one craft before they bump into first contact with the aliens.

So I am going to give ‘Doc’ another chance because I also wikipedia’d him this morning and was shocked and amazed that he wrote in the 1930s (which gives him more cred in my eyes) and he is allegedly seen as “the father of space opera” (so he at least has fans who like him enough to talk him up on wikipedia). He also hung out a bit with Robert Heinlein so that must make him cool:

In Heinlein’s essay, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of “superman” when he asked Dr. Smith for help in purchasing a car. Smith tested the car by driving it on a back road at illegally high speeds with their heads pressed tightly against the roof columns to listen for chassis squeaks by bone conduction—a process apparently improvised on the spot. (E. E. Smith, Wikipedia)

Here’s hoping that the book picks up a bit once I’ve trudged through the ‘info dump’ part at the start. As an aside, Charles Stross has blogged about the necessary but painful phenomenon of the info-dump in sci-fi writing and how difficult it is to do without bogging the story down. Perhaps when Smith was writing, this kind of high level universe imagining was considered to be exciting where as now we’re used to all those ideas (e.g. to me I see galaxies colliding on APOD every week and I’ve known what a solar system was since I was a kid)

So has anyone out there read any ‘Doc’ and what did you think? Any thoughts on how science fiction has changed in the last 80 years?

Links

E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith on Wikipedia
Triplanetary on Librarything has some good reviews with interesting points of view too
Charles Stross talks about using second person voice to avoid infodumps

[tags]books, boring books, brain dump, e. e. smith, judging a book by its cover, lensman, scifi[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross, scifi

I have been working on a web app written in C/C++ that can change the password for lighttpd mod_auth using htdigest mode. You might use the htdigest app that comes with apache to do this but if you are running busybox, you can do it with md5sum as follows:

const int md5_hash_len = 32;

char cmd[255];
char new_password[] = "secr3t pa$$word en+ered 6y us3r";
char digest[md5_hash_len + 1];

sprintf(cmd, "echo -n \"admin:Authorized users only:%s\" | md5sum", new_password);
FILE *fh = popen(cmd, "r");
fread(digest, md5_hash_len, 1, fh);
digest[md5_hash_len] = '\0';
pclose(fh);

sprintf(cmd, "admin:Authorized users only:%s\n", digest);
fh = fopen("/etc/lighttpd.passwd","w");
fwrite(cmd, 1, strlen(cmd), fh);
fclose(fh);

[tags]htdigest, lighttp, md5, programming[/tags]

Uncategorized

I haven’t been one to push Sol’s development deliberately, I prefer to let him learn at his own pace and discover the world in a natural and fun way. That’s why it sometimes comes as a surprise to me when he does something new. Some things come gradually, I notice new words and his ability to piece together sentences evolving slowly, his memory or attention span growing (like how he now holds me to task on things I promise him rather than forgetting as soon as I find a good distraction) but then there are the sudden leaps of cognition that take you by surprise.

Counting has been one of those things. We’ve been counting for a long time mind you, a lot of books have counting in them as do TV shows but Sol has usually just gone along with the rhythm of it “one, two, seven, eight” in time to the music. Last night we were reading “A Wiggly Zoo Adventure” when we got to the page where Greg sees four lions and Sol pointed to each lion and counted “one, two, three, four”. I just about fell off the side of the bed (where I was sitting)! The next page is where Dorothy sees two cute baby bears. He counted these “one, two … three” and I realised that he felt that the rhythm was wrong just counting to two so I corrected him saying that sometimes you just count “one, two” and he got it. The next page was Wags with two seals and he counted them correctly “one, two”, then we did Henry the Octopus’ Zebras “one, two, three” (“and they are stripy”). Wow! I was really excited by then so I was happy to read the book a second time with him. Then he counted everything on the pages of “Robot Dog” and “Trees”.

So that’s how it happens. It is so rewarding to be witness to the development of this small child and to be with him when he comes to those moments in life where his mind opens to the the universe just a little more.

[tags]children, counting, early development, fatherhood, learning[/tags]

fatherhood

FixedR6 at Fulltime Casual has made his feelings on the upcoming film adaptation of Neuromancer well felt and I am disheartened myself (though I suppose I will have to see it no matter how badly it is done).

This is just a continuation of many movies that I will still have to see despite knowing I will be disappointed including the Star Wars prequels and the latest Indiana Jones. Ok so it’s not a long list but you get what I mean. It’s the phenomenon of knowing you are going to have to go look at a train wreck of a film because you have always dreamed they would make the film and now that you’re presented with reality, the dream has taken on a less than perfect aspect.

I read Neuromancer in 2000 when I was on our big trip to the US (that we regrettably spent our home deposit on in one of those “life’s too short” moments not realising that housing prices were about to go through the roof and we could have saved for three holidays with what we had to raise in order to buy a house eight years later but I digress). Our friend’s boyfriend was with me when I went into a shop to grab something for the train ride from Boston to New York and he said “have you read Neuromancer? You’d really like it, it’s got this hot ninja chick in it”. So of course I picked it up and then wanted to stay extra time on the busses, trains and planes for the rest of the trip so I could keep reading it. I seem to remember being in Toronto just refusing to leave the hostel because “Toronto’s boring anyway”.

Neuromancer blew my mind. It’s kind of about having your mind blown anyway. It’s got dystopian future, mega corporations, cyberspace, and loads of impressive culture which is so alien yet so believable (I mean who would have thought of rastafarians in space?) and it’s prophetic as well (don’t forget it was written in 1984 or sometime about then).

So that was the beginning of my adult love of science fiction which I hadn’t exactly abandoned from childhood so much as lacked a bridge due to just not knowing anyone who could help me find the good stuff beyond what had been in my High School library. Fortunately around the same time, I became friends with my science fiction guru / mentor Nick who fed me a steady diet of Ken Macleod and Neal Stephenson until I could emerge from the nest and find my own way around the shelves of Pulp Fiction (the most bestest ever scifi / fantasy / mystery bookshop in Queensland at least who don’t have a fricking website for some reason).

So Neuromancer has a special place in my heart and if you haven’t read it then you should go and do so before I release some kind of visual virus that hacks your brain and turns you into a drooling reptilian brained zombie. No wait, that was Snow Crash but that’s another story.

Check out my book collection on librarything: see djfoobarmatt

[tags]books, movies, neuromancer, scifi, william gibson[/tags]

books, movies

Tor is a science fiction and fantasy book publisher or maybe I should say The Most Best science fiction and fantasy publisher. The new Tor website is awesome. One of the highlights has been the art being published on the site including this web comic released today Leviathan.

I’m also enjoying checking out all the artist profiles like this one on Shuan Tan

I once had a magazine cover painting rejected because it supposedly had a penis in it. This was not so much embarrassing as curious – I had no idea where it was! I eventually found it in an abstract background element, not even a real object but an accidentally ‘penis-shaped’ negative space. These days I check all my work for anything even vaguely penile!

When the site was launched a week or two back, they released heaps of wallpapers, pdfs and a couple of audio short stories so it’s worth registering with their site for those kinds of tasty freebies.

[tags]art, books, tor[/tags]

Uncategorized

Speaking of Escape Pod, it’s spin-off / sister podcast PseudoPod recently had their 100th episode and they pulled out HP Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann. I’ve never read any Lovecraft (though I’ve heard the name) and can’t say I’ve ever picked up a gothic / horror novel but, wow! I really enjoyed this story! So I’ve added PseudoPod to my subscriptions and maybe I’ll be reading a few more “I want to sleep with the lights on now please” kind of books.

[tags]pseudopod, lovecraft, the music of erich zann, podcast[/tags]

Uncategorized

Had a good laugh at the latest Escape Pod this morning How I Mounted Goldie, Saved My Partner Lori, and Sniffed Out The People’s Justice, a heart warming cop drama with an electronically enhanced dog. Clever story and fun characters.

[tags]escapepod, scifi, short story[/tags]

Uncategorized

see screen cap, the “Back to the Future” word generator lives on in my app (oops). See also Science Tech Device Name Generator .

[tags]silliness[/tags]

Uncategorized