Arrival and a doubt

The Arrival (1996) is a fast paced alien invasion movie.
It does not have presidents preaching patriotic feelgood early in the morning, no laser beams causing widespread mayhem, no tentacled monsters.
It does have conspiracy, complete with men in black (actually gray overalls), black speakers going bdddrrrrrp in an observatory, huge radio antenna arrays, a geeky astronomer not afraid to follow his instincts and a satisfying ending.

It is midway between two extremes.

What would I personally like an alien invasion movie to be like? Quiet real terror mixed with the paranoia of Philip K Dick novels, real hard-sf technology - no blinking-lights-ray-guns, and a potent dose of wonder, all splashed on a canvas of a start studded night sky. A galaxy spanning plot.

Zane Zaminski (played by Charlie Sheen) has this uncanny resemblance to Dr. Freeman of the famed game Half-Life, but the situations don't really match much.

A thought on the aliens' structure. They are humanoid, but their knees bend the other way. Like kangaroos. Like all quadrupeds. The hind legs of a kangaroo or a cheetah are extremely powerful. For running, while catching prey or while avoiding being caught as one. That's how they have evolved. Which brings me to my question. Let's forget about the scientific validity of the movie for a moment. Would any naturally evolved beings develop such hind legs and still be bipeds? and vice versa? Or am I missing something here?

Books I bought over the weekend

A brand new copy of The Algebraist - Iain M Banks - I was seduced by reading the back cover blurb.
The Third Culture - John Brockman
The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner (at last! and just 20 bucks! AND hardcover! at the Sunday Book Market at Abids - where else?). Update - 06 Jul 2007 - Just discovered it's the first edition. Hm!
Centuries - A A Attanasio
Fire upon the Earth - The Story of the Christian Church - Norman A Langford - bought this on a whim
The West End Horror - Nicholas Meyer
A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein - this has been apparently banned from some libraries because it 'encourages bad behaviour' in children.
A well worn copy of Atlas Shrugged.
Dayworld - Philip Jose Farmer
The Dark Beyond the Stars - Frank M Robinson
The Seeds of Time - John Wyndham
Heavy Weather - Bruce Sterling - this looks to be as good as Distraction.
and some pulp.

Apart from this, bought a 4 DVD pack of Rajinikanth movies - I was looking for Baasha - a movie I had watched a long time back in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, when I had gone there with my dad. I quite enjoyed it at that time, and it was the same yesterday. Thanks to Satya for the tip on where to get the DVD.

Finishing A Good Old Fashioned Future (Bruce Sterling) right now. Enjoyable, except for 'Big Jelly'.

Short

I just remembered that the deadline for the short story competition of IASFS (that's the Indian Association of Science Fiction Studies), in Douglas Adam's words, whooshed bye on June 1st.

The last and first time I wrote a story and won a prize for it was in school - a short detective story contest sponsored by The Assam Tribune. I borrowed part of the hero's name from the hero of Jatayu's books - Jatayu being a fictional character who's himself a writer in Satyajit Ray's superb Feluda series.

Speaking of short stories, last year Wired magazine asked leading writers to come up with the shortest stories they can think of. Some of the best are here.

Then there's the Asimov edited anthology of really short sf stories - not able to find my copy right now. The ones in that were not one-liners, but mostly one-paragraphers and one-pagers.

Coming back to short stories of 'normal' length, my favourite ones in the sf genre remain

• One-Face - Larry Niven
• Chrysalis - Robert Reed (more like a novella)
• Most of ones in Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams
• Most of the ones in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear

Some news, albeit a bit old

The 9th annual conference of the Indian Association of Science Fiction studies is in Pondicherry, 9-11th November 2007.

Overload

Have been thinking of getting another bookshelf, or maybe clear out some of the racks I'm currently using for keeping other stuff. And hopefully, with the Dekoh Books app , start a cataloging process :D.


Also need to store them sorted - or atleast, in a reasonably sorted manner, so that I don't end up getting multiple copies of the same book. Wondering when Dekoh books is gonna support barcode scanning.

Some more of my treasury ..hehe..it's good to gloat, sometimes.