Yearly Archives: 2009

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

Moreta is a book about a pandemic, and its hard to make those fun... If you've bothered to find out anything about the book in advance (or read the preceding Pern books, where it is referred to), you know that its not going to be a fun ride. On the other hand, the book is an interesting read, and its educational to find out how much knowledge has been lost in the Pern universe between Moreta and Lessa. For example, its clear in Moreta that everyone knows they moved from the Southern continent, whereas that is much less clear in the books set in Lessa's time. Its hard to say that a book about thousands of people dying is enjoyable. However, the story is a gripping one, and I'm glad I read it. [isbn: 034529873X] [award: nominee hugo 1984]

Continue ReadingMoreta: Dragonlady of Pern

Better Than Life

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This is the second novelized book from the guys who wrote Red Dwarf. The first book of course shares its name with the name of the TV series. This book deviates from the plot line used in the TV series, and at some points feels more like a summary of the series than a novelization. Then again there are also times where they explore things that would be way to expensive to do in a TV show for the BBC, so that's fun. [isbn: 0451452313]

Continue ReadingBetter Than Life

Red Dwarf

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This book was exciting because its the first book I have read on the spur of the moment after perusing my book shelves -- for the first time in many years I have my entire collection out of boxes on on shelves, which makes it much easier to just grab something to read. This book is a classic, and I love the TV series (which I discovered before the books), and this book. The book is different from the TV series, and feels more like a summary of the series than anything else, but its an engaging read. [isbn: 0451452011]

Continue ReadingRed Dwarf

The King’s Buccaneer

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

I really liked this book, as I do most of Feist's work, although he does have a talent for writing books which are long. This book continues the story line from the Magician (Apprentice and Master), Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon. I like that, and have felt for a while that Prince of the Blood was a bit of a tangent from the main thrust of the series -- although characters which are used in later stories are introduced through that book. [isbn: 0553563734]

Continue ReadingThe King’s Buccaneer

Deadly Exposure

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This book isn't very good. I read it because my six year old son really liked the front cover art, and wanted me to read it. He wanted me to read it so much in fact that he bought two copies to give me. The book starts off with something which feels like its lifted straight out of the Andromeda Strain, you know, government agency / possible alien infection / we need a crack team of scientists! The book then moves on to introduce a selection of surprisingly one sided characters -- the fat self obsessed scientist, the thin young lady obsessed with getting it on, et cetera. The story jumps around, with sometimes implausible outcomes... For example, people are mid argument, and just magically stop when something happens nearby. Do you know people who stop arguing because the lights flicker? The book does pick up a little at the end, and I assume all the weird personification we're subjected to is an attempt to convey that the characters are losing their grip on sanity. Overall, I thought this book was quite rough, which is surprising from an author who apparently has had four other books published. I have revenge…

Continue ReadingDeadly Exposure

Incorrect channel numbers in MythTV

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Mythtv

We've had a HDHomeRun for a while now, and I'm very happy with it. One wart however was that Catherine was complaining that tuning for Go! didn't work (an extra Win TV channel we get in this area). It was odd -- it appeared in the channel guide, but recordings would end up recording ABC1 instead, and we couldn't tune to the channel in the live TV interface either. I fired up the channel editor in mythtv-setup, and the problem was actually pretty easy to solve... The channel scan had assigned channel number 2 to Go!, which is the same channel number as ABC1. It had also gotten the channel number for Win TV wrong, but we hadn't noticed that because that wasn't overlapping with another channel. The channel numbers seem arbitrary, given the database is also storing frequency and demultiplexing information, so the fix was as simple as just giving the various WIN channels the correct numbers (or I suspect any number that was unique) in mythtv-setup.

Continue ReadingIncorrect channel numbers in MythTV

Bolo Brigade

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

There seems to be a formula for bolo books -- an obsolete bolo or two, and alien invader, a solitary bolo commander, and preferably a management chain which either doesn't trust bolos, the officer, or preferably both. Its even better if the chain of command is also grossly incompetent. This book has all of those, and I am left feeling that it didn't really add much to the overall bolo universe. Other books have explored some new aspect of the bolo psyche, or expanded on the history of the concordiat universe in some way, whereas this book didn't feel like it did any of that. However, this was an entertaining book, and is reasonably well written. It just wasn't as ambitious as I'd hoped it would be. [isbn: 067187781x]

Continue ReadingBolo Brigade

The Stars Must Wait

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This book is a novelization of "Night of the Trolls", which I have already read as part of The Compleat Bolo and Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow. I'm pretty fond of the short story, and this book version didn't start out strongly -- there is a prelude to explain some background, and then the book launches into what feels like the exact text of the short story. You can tell it hasn't been edited much, because there are minor continuity errors between this first chapter and the prelude. There are other continuity errors as well -- the blurb on the back says that the main character goes into stasis in 2002, but his wife dies in 1992 which is meant to be after the main character goes into stasis, and the map that he uses once out of stasis is copyright 2011 (even though the main character claims to have bought it just before going into stasis). Note that these dates are different to those used in the short story. These errors are distracting although the underlying story is still a good one. However, the good bits of the story are all contained in the short story. This feels like a poorly…

Continue ReadingThe Stars Must Wait

Days of Blood and Fire

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Book

This is book seven of the extended Deverry series (preceeded by Daggerspell, Darkspell, Dawnspell, The Dragon Revenant, A Time of Exile, and A Time of Omens). The blurb on the back cover of this book implies that it should be safe for a new reader to enter the series here, and I can understand why publishers would want to do such a thing for such a long series. By contrast, Asimov's Extended Foundation Series has many entry points, with most stories being free standing. I think Kerr did a reasonable job of introducing the characters without being overly annoying about it. I've seen reviews from others that say that there is a lot of annoying ground to recover, such as the Etheric travel sequences. I disagree however -- these are just as long winded as in other books in the series, and we're talking about a couple of paragraphs, not hundreds of pages. The only part of this book which didn't sit well with me was Rori picking up a girlfriend with basically now warning. Perhaps I'm dense, but I didn't see it coming at all, and thought it was rather abrupt. I'm also not sure it did much to…

Continue ReadingDays of Blood and Fire

End of content

No more pages to load

Newer Posts
Older Posts