Book Review: Lyonesse II

About twenty pages into Jack Vance's Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl, I started thinking that the book would end up an awful lot like the 1981 film Heavy Metal.  Both feature a mystical sphere of evil, which corrupts those who use it, and in the earliest chapter of Vance's follow-up to to his wonderful Lyonesse I: Suldrun's Garden the story does actually follow the set up of Heavy Metal to a large degree - person gets the pearl, pearl corrupts them, someone else kills them and takes the pearl, repeat.

What I'm really loving best about Vance's stuff however, is the fact that he starts with a relatively simple fantasy concept (magic item), and then inserts it into his larger world, showing how the various wizards, nobles and even common men of his world are affected by the item and deal with its potential for corruption.

Like the first book in the series, the story plays with high fantasy concepts as well as fairy tale concepts and blends them together into a really intriguing story, one that I'm definitely planning to complete with the award-winning conclusion to the trilogy, Lyonesse III: Maduac, which I'll be reading next month.

Really neat stuff.

Also a quick side note - the knight on a giant cat image shown on the cover is representative of some stuff that happens in the book, you just have to wait a while for it to show up.

Bookmonkey, Mountain Man pt. 2

Hello good readers, I'm back from the back of beyond and have become all rough and tumble.

Or at least, able to pose as mostly rough and tumble while gazing into the distance.

All right, I'll admit it wasn't my axe, and the coffee was instant rather than percolated, and my cool Superman shirt was "aged" when I got it, wait - you know what never mind.

I went out camping, did some horseback riding and walked with some wolves, yup, good old Canis Lupus (Grey Wolves), and specifically a fine fellow called Scrappy Dave, who you could also visit at the Northern Lights Wildlife Wolf Centre in Golden, BC.

I'd be crazy to admit I wasn't a little nervous around them, but they were actually a lot of fun to be with as long as we listened to our guides and were respectful of the wolves.

Although I only read a few books on the trip (reviews on those later), it was pretty great overall, and I had a birthday to boot!

Bookmonkey, Mountain Man

So I'm off to the mountains pretty soon, don't worry I won't forget you, I'll just have a small break between posts.

Read on friends, read on.

Reverse Engineering a Bacheror of Arts Degree - Attempt #1

One of the joys of having children five years apart is the ability to take the lessons learned with the first kid and see if they have any application with the second (often not the case).

Right now, for example, my oldest daughter has recently finished her undergraduate degree and my youngest is currently headed into her last year of high school.  This gives me the opportunity to revisit the whole "Requirements for a Bachelor of Arts" degree again.

Basically, the calendar of whichever University the prospective student is planning to go to outlines what courses they need to take to get a degree, the problem is the advice is scatted across a number of different pages and sections and can easily feel overwhelming, so I thought I would take a look at the current requirements (2014/15) through the lens of my older daughter's course selection (which obviously worked out as she has a degree).

Now there are a couple of things I have to keep in mind, for example my youngest is not likely to take the same courses my oldest did as she doesn't want the same kind of degreee, and my oldest chose to double-major so there will be some modifications necessary to fit the interests of my youngest.  In addition, she (the youngest) doesn't have a major chosen yet, (which is pretty common even for first-year University students), so I have to keep the outline vague for now.

It's nice to know I can find things to do with my spare time since I finished school.

Book Review: The Centauri Device

Picking up M. John Harrison’s 1974 Science Fiction novel The Centauri Device, I was pretty excited, as the book was only 185 pages long and seemed to have an interesting premise. It follows a space-trucker who is being drafted by various sides of a massive war to help them control an ultimate weapon, only he has absolutely no interest in them. Think of it like Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), but without Luke and with Han Solo as the main character – not the Han who decides to pitch in at the end (sorry for the mild 37-year-old spoiler), but the Han from the beginning, who could care less about anything other than staying ahead of his debts and finding work.

The novel followed themes I would read again in Transmetropolitan, a world where everything seems messed up beyond all recognition (and yes I know there is a useful acronym for this but both my Mother and my teen daughter read my blog, so deal with it).

Of the various factions attempting to get the help of the main character, two come from armies which are nothing like their contemporary counterparts, and the world is such a bizarre collection of sensory overload that it was often easy to get confused as to what was going on.

Like Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination, the book plays with a lot of standard SF story points, but unlike that book, I think only those really interested in reading the more arcane works of classic SF would find it a worthwhile read.

RIP Robin Williams

Last night I read that Robin Williams had passed.

Like just about everyone I know, I've been enjoying Robin Williams films, television and standup pretty much my entire life.  From the early days of Mork and Mindy to some really great drama, he found his way into an awful lot of my favourite stuff.

He'll be missed.

Series Review: Millennium

One of the joys of watching classic television with my kids is it allows me to revisit personal favourites of my own childhood.  When they were younger we watched all of classic Star Trek (including the cartoon and a number of the movies), and I found the show held up extremely well to multiple viewings, and even the outdated effects didn't obstruct my kids enjoyment of the engaging story lines and characters.

For the past few years my wife and youngest daughter have been watching The X-Files together, and as they got closer and closer to the point where I stopped watching (end of season 6), the more excited I've become to finally catch up on a show I left behind years ago.

But being the orderly guy I am, I suggested that before they hit season seven, we check out the short-lived sister series Millennium (1996-99), which focused on Frank Black, an ex-FBI agent who had the ability to see inside the mind of killers and worked now as a consultant with an organization called The Millennium Group.

Starring Lance Henriksen as Frank, the show focused on both a "killer of the week" type story like many procedurals, but also chose to examine the millennial fear that existed in the era leading up to the year 2000.  What I loved about the show at the time was how Frank balanced the dark and horrible aspects of his job with a family life, and how (introduced early in the first season) his young daughter also seemed to have a similar ability to his.

Although the show ended after only three seasons, there was a finale built into the seventh season of Tthe X-Files (which I haven't seen yet), but the show works well on its own, with each season having its own distinct feel and a number of really creepy standout episodes.