I’ve still been reading although not writing, which may be preferrable.
Someone asked me the other day why do you write something you will not share with others and nobody therefore looks at, the answer is not as easy to quantify as you might think. I write a lot for work and lots of people get to read it and therefore criticize it, this writing is for me, to open it up for others would allow criticism and to be honest I really don’t always feel like placing my private writing under the same scrutiny as my work writing.
However Thomas and I are going to Europe and I may allow access to some so they can keep track of me.
To the reading. Well I moved from one god book to another, this time Robert Sawyer’s Calculating God.
It is the first book by Sawyer I have read and was an enjoyable read. Full of warmth and humor which is surprising as the book is largely a conversation between an alien and a man regarding the existence of god. The surprise of this book for me was how well Sawyer writes the alien, there is alienness obviously, she looks different than humans but there is also an genuine connection between Holluss and Tom. They have things in common they grow to love each other and share the same concerns and flaws. Also what genius to make the alien female, how many male aggressive aliens are out there, how different for this contact to be a female scientist.
A good book with a flawed ending but a very different read.
The on to something different, my first steam punk novel. As we are going to England how convenient that the Pax Britannia omnibus arrived in the mail. I love the novels of Haggard, Conan Doyle, Verne and Wells and this series is very much in that vein. Boys own adventure, explosions, damsels in distress and the fate of the empire on the brink ate very turn of the page. Ripping yarns with a hero who seems part Jerry Cornelius, part James Bond and all stiff upper lip English Gentleman with a sardonic grin and an eye for the ladies. This is Victorian England with a twist.
Lots of fun, well written, memorable more for the spectacle like a summer block buster than the ideas. There are two stories left in the omnibus that I will read as who can resit a hero called Ulysses Quicksilver, I may even search out the other stories in this franchise.
What would happen if the USA was governed by a hereditary presidency, had a fully functioning feudal system and was overseen by a fundamentalist christian watchdog that required all religions to meet the same standard of conformity. Some might say that would be a good thing and others may say we already do.
This is the world of Julian Comstock after the efflorescence of oil. Like Pax Britannia this is a book written in a style of the past but it is a book that holds mirror up and says this is what might happen if you are complacent and allow the corporate aristocracy to continue to hold the purse strings the way they do. It is also timely as oil becomes more expensive as a commodity and investors move towards land as an investment. This is really a possible future, it is not a post apocalyptic novel but a fairly reasonable extrapolation of current events, especially valid as this week we watch the intransigence of our political system being held hostage by fixed thinking on both sides of the aisle.
Wilson with this book has done what many Victorian novelists did which is comment on their society while at the same time tell a good story and he has done it with a consistency of style.
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