Category: Culture

George Alec Effinger fans will want to be making their way to “Golden Gryphon Press”: and picking up a copy of Budayeen Nights. Nine pieces of fiction, all set in the world of Marid’s Budayeen. Four of them are Marid stories, including one which is just the first two chapters of the never-finished fourth Budayeen book. One of them is the first few pages of what would have been the last Budayeen book. One of them is a Honey Pilar story, and it rocks.

Barbara Hambly wrote the foreword, and introductions to each story. Her anger and her love for George are both evident; the love in stronger measure.

The NBC version of Coupling is incredibly bad. I know, everyone said it was bad, but I wanted to see for myself. I lasted about five minutes before screaming in horror and deleting my TiVo season pass.

The sad thing is that it uses the same scripts. It practically uses the same sets. But the acting — it’s like Shakespeare performed by earnestly dull high school students. Not that the original Coupling was Shakespeare, but the American cast isn’t really up to the standards of high school students either.

22 episodes? NBC bought 22 episodes? Did they buy a blindfold and ear plugs before looking at the pilot?

Quicksilver is so damned big. My god, it’s big. It’s 900 pages, and it’s really really big, and it’s the first volume of three.

And it’s Neal Stephenson, so you know it’s going to be even more wordy than that.

I’m about halfway through, thanks to an early shipment to a bookstore which will remain nameless. The book’s divided into thirds, more or less. The first third is Daniel Waterhouse’s story, which can in no way be considered to have a plot. Halfway through the second third, one character mentions the picaresque genre, in which a random character wanders through an interesting landscape without direction. That would be the first third of the book. Just to put a cherry on top of it, the story opens quite late in Waterhouse’s life, and then proceeds to tell us all about his earlier history in flashback. So no tension, unless you count the pirates.

Fortunately, the second third has characters who are actually going somewhere and experiencing difficulties getting there. I have hopes for the third portion. I note with some interest that all the characters mentioned on the bookflap are from the first two sections. I’m wondering if anyone has actually gotten to the third bit.

I’m also enjoying the hell out of the monster, of course. Stephenson is nothing if not informative, and the book is a prime example of what transfictionalism might have been if it had been invented centuries ago; it’s geek SF, just like Cryptonomicon, except that the geeks are seventeenth century mathematicians and alchemists. It’s utterly delightful. I love it.

Just it’s a good thing that I’ve already come to terms with the knowledge that Stephenson is not wedded to traditional narrative structures.