INTERACTION

Yeah. Very impressive.

Ironically--according to Moorcock--those three Mars books were his father's favourite over anything else he'd written.

So far, I'm enjoying them.
And nice to see Moorcock's earlier works and style.


Rafala

I was delighted recently to find a Sexton Blake novel he wrote online: http://www.eclipse.co.uk/sweetdespise/m ... isis1.html

_________________
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction

Ah, but these were his first books, so obviously he needed to get up to speed

I vaguely recall that in "Wizardry and Wild Romance" Moorcock argued nearly all fantasy was formulaic, and once you knew the formula churning it out was ridiculously easy.

I'm not sure if other writers in the genre would agree, but he certainly lived up to his own premise in the early days.

_________________
http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

Yesterday read "Nitrospective" by Andrew Hook. Crazy ideas, crazy stories.

_________________
http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

I'm reading Embassytown and enjoying this interesting book. I am reading it slowly. The plot is not very lively so far, but the book is dense with concepts from linguistics and philosophy. One way of interpreting the story is through the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that one's language determines what one can think and how one views the world. This seems to be the most common way of looking at Embassytown, but I am not convinced that it is the most useful approach. That hypothesis has its own problems, and any use of it made in the book might be (following Ian Sales) mangled. Here is a good text that shows just how difficult the Hypothesis is to understand and evaluate.

Although this Hypothesis might have been in China Mieville's mind, I think it is better to note the implications of his claim that almost every statement made by the Hosts is a 'truth-claim.' That is, they at least believe that everything they state is true, when they claim it. Hence, as Upsalafan Johan Anglemark pointed out to me, they normally cannot make hypothetical claims about what might be the case now or in future. Nor can they normally lie, since no lie is believed true by the liar. I used the qualifiers 'almost', 'at least,' and 'normally,' since much of what I have read so far describes attempts by the humans on the Hosts' planet to enlarge the latter's linguistic skills, by getting them to think and speak about what is not the case. This fascinates me.

_________________
http://paulwoodward.wordpress.com/

I've only read about 160 pages so far, so I guess you are right. These pages interest me, because my training was in philosophy. I had to read a lot of philosophy of language, linguistics, and psychology. One of my teachers, Sydney Morgenbesser, lectured on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This was in 1967, and I have been interested in that Hypothesis ever since. I think the linguistic aspects of Embassytown can be tackled by notions about reference, truth, and symbols. This approach is anathema to Whorfian relativists, thanks to their rejection of unique truths of sentences and unique references of names.

I'd be happy with "crazy ideas, crazy stories" as a review

_________________
www.andrew-hook.com

You're too easily pleased Andrew.

Just finished "Blood and Grit 21", Simon Clark's e-reworking of his very first book, with bonus material and all. Great reminder of how daring he can be.

_________________
http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

Just finished the second annual Best British Short Stories anthology, edited by Nicholas Royle.
There are some wonderfully dark contributions - Joel Lane, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, Rob Shearman among them - to satisfy most tastes on here. And some quite brilliant 'mainstream' stories (if such a thing exists).

_________________
www.stephenbacon.co.uk

I got Deadfolk by Charlie Williams in the Kindle sale yesterday, for a measly 99p.

It's brilliant - I read it in one sitting, while trying not to laugh out loud, as I was sitting in the garden and the neighbours might start to wonder...

_________________
http://www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk

@Paul. You were right about linguistics and Embassytown. I'm now at about p180. It looks like the book is becoming more political than scientific. Perhaps the first part mostly sets up a strange setting in which the conflicts of interest play out.

I'm reading Worldsoul by Liz Williams (the first thing I've read by her, I think), and it's very good so far. Lots going on, but the focus is a library of books spirited away from the fire at Alexandria, and the librarians who have to arm themselves with swords and guns to keep the stacks clear.

_________________
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction

Yesterday read "The Female of the Species and other tales of terror" by Richard Davis, which was pretty much good, old fashioned horror, but with some bizarre typos. Usually I can tell why a typo occurred, but there didn't seem to be much sense to these - 'arid' for 'and', 'point' for 'part' 'corning' for 'coming', 'dag' for 'dog' - so that I wondered if they'd been inserted as controls for the proofreader, or possibly made up another, secret story of their own, an idea I quite like.

_________________
http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

This looks like OCR faults, not actual typos... and just bad proof-reading.

_________________
Pigasus Press | VideoVista | The ZONE