An untitled post.

I just realized that I buy very little science fiction these days, and read even less. Whatever I buy now are books I really want (rather than buy it because 'it's there' and going for a discount!). These are mostly authors like Gibson, Neal Asher, Robert Reed and the rising wave of Indian sf in English represented by works such as Priya Sarukkai Chabria's Generation 14 and Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape. The reason I read less sf is because I read other stuff more now, and there are only 24 hours in a day. I am rereading some of my favourite sf classics, and will probably write about them sometime.

Listened to an audiobook called 'Letting Go of God' by the delightful Julia Sweeney. It's also a TED lecture and available on Google video. She is simple, straightforward, sincere and a joy to listen to as she recounts her early religious upbringing and the events that led her to realize that there is no evidence for a creator, and no need for one.

On the running front, the ITBS is better. As I read that post now, I can't help but laugh at myself. 6 days to fix ITBS? :)). Got diagnosed with a stress fracture last week though, on my left leg, which will take atleast 2 months to heal. Of course - no running till then.

Tagged

It has been almost a month since my friend Arvind Mishra, an sf writer, tagged me in this post.

The meme is to choose ten sf books of your choice and just scribble down the fifth sentence on page 56 of all of them and then invite your friends in turn to guess the books where these extracts are selected from. And then declare the answers. (You can choose non-sf books also, but I have chosen only sf - these are among my most well-liked sf works of all time).

Warning : Answers are just below the list.

Here goes (some of the sentences are really vague!)

1. With a little skill and care there were few items that could not be tackled safely; the only things banned were hot soups and excessively crumbly pastries.

2. "If this is true, then the Straumers may have a chance."

3. The nervousness that Stormgren had first felt had long since passed away.

4. "I do not quite follow you."

5. "What?", Lvov tried to focus."

6. Their clothes were not particularly revealing, he noted regretfully, and not one had any sign of décolleté, although some dresses seemed to designed to emphasize the buttocks.

7. A quick punch was all it took.

8. "I helped to do it, even."

9. "This way is much better," Leroux said, touching her skin delicately, poking under her cheeks and chin, pulling back her hair to feel her temples.

10. "But that's the point: it's not right, Captain," Renner protested.

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Answers:

1. 2001 A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
2. A Fire upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
3. Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
4. Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
5. Vacuum Diagrams - Stephen Baxter (Short story - Gossamer)
6. Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov
7. Grass - Sherri S. Tepper
8. Distraction - Bruce Sterling
9. The Collected Stories of Greg Bear - Greg Bear (Short story - Sisters)
10. The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Indian SF stories

Dr. Arvind Mishra writes about the first SF stories in India.

It would be a good idea to construct a timeline for this subject. A database that would have a comprehensive list of such stories in regional Indian languages for those early years. Articles get published every now and then on this - it would be great if the data in them could be aggregated.

The Man from Earth

Why is the movie 'The Man from Earth' named liked it is? If you can figure it out after watching it you are smarter than I am.

It is about a university professor who claims to be 14000 years old, practically immortal. The movie picks up when he's about to leave his job for another so that people don't start wondering why he does not grow old. The rest of the movie is made up of the conversation between him and his colleagues at his farewell party.

There is no passion, no great revelations, a cliched view of world history, a single attempt at jolting Christian audiences. It's a very short movie. Not in length but in content. Minimalist is the word.

I liked K-Pax better. If you're thinking what these two movies have in common, it's the nature of the ending.

The secret revealed

Just back from the vacation. Finished The Manticore's Secret by Samit Basu. It's the second in the GameWorld trilogy, the first being The Simoqin Prophecies. Some disclaimers before I say anything more

1. I don't read much fantasy

2. Whatever fantasy I choosily, occasionally read I usually like

3. I don't like the terms science fiction and fantasy being clubbed together, viewed as one and the same genre, or works being described as SFF (science fiction/fantasy).

Overall I like the book in a way, because I think it's in a class of it's own. I'm tempted to say that the series was conjured up to bank on the success of the Potter books/LOTR movies, just like Five Point Someone led to a horde of such books. TMS does borrow from wildly dispersed sources, as the back cover blurb itself says, but it does it in a way which is enjoyable and unique. That again does not imply that it's just a goulash of borrowed ideas - but the borrowed ideas are cheekily and enjoyably parodied. Maybe the author could have made it a little less obvious by not having a 'Dark Tower' a la LOTR.

The idea of a "GameWorld" and the justification for the name is actually developed in this volume. Even though the first volume had the trilogy name on the spine but it failed to mention anything which would explain the reasoning behind the name. (Hm on second thoughts better check the first volume again in case I missed it).

The propensity of the author to take well known names from mythology/the current real world and use them reversed to name his characters/locations is such that you'll end up checking every unusual name against this theory even though most of them do not fit this. The gods-in-the-sky routine pops up every few pages towards the end. A little tiresome, that. And evidently the book is bolder in it's treatment of "racy" scenes as compared to Part One.

My favourite aspect, however, remains the alternate world, or should I say the alternate Indian subcontinent. I think that's why I've stuck to the books.

Currently reading The Legends of Pensam, a gift from my cousin. A beautiful book, that's all I can say right now.

Just a few

P.D. James - Children of Men
Eastern Love
A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett (One of those books which you buy because it feels so good to hold them in your hands)
Faces of the Future - The Lessons of Science Fiction - Brian Ash

Down the memory wormhole

When I think about it, my fascination with science fiction began as a fascination with space when I was a 7-8 year old kid. The earliest memories I have are of a scifi series called Space City Sigma, broadcast every Sunday morning back in those days (mid 80s) when the only TV channel you could get in India was Doordarshan. But I was lucky enough to have a dad who was posted in a remote place near the Indo-Bangladesh border (if you can call that lucky) and the Bangladesh tv signals were stronger than Delhi's. Needless to say, BTV was filled with Hollywood movies and tv series.
But I digress. I remember very little of SCS, because what really filled me with that oft-mentioned sense-of-wonder was another series called Indradhanush. Same channel, same day, but later (or was it earlier?) Briefly, it involved a boy who manages to build a computer from scrap and it actually turns out to be an alien intelligence from the Andromeda nebula. Juvenile stuff? Yes, and it was the kind of stuff which inspires, fills a young boy's mind with the vastness of the universe, makes him want to roam the cosmos in a ship of his own.

That boyhood desire of roaming in a ship of my own has still stayed with me - it manifests itself now with my obsession with space/flight simulations, where there is no predetermined objective or path, but you're free to fly around as you wish. Hm...that also explains my occasional dabbling with OpenGL. Self discovery can be revealing :).

A starship command deck, made out of matchboxes and face-cream boxes covered with white paper. The care I lavished upon it! Gluing and regluing, adding consoles, screens for tracing the starship's destination, pasting white paper over the parts where it would get dirty...

My dad had piles and piles of Reader's Digests, dating back from the 70's. Those used to be my staple diet. And there used to be really good articles on space exploration. Banal stuff about the solar system's planets' atmospheres can be of no interest to a 7 year old boy, but the sheer thrill of just reading about it was enough.