Climategate

Is the name being given to the contents of my previous post. Apparently as much is being put into it about the (UK) mainstream media ignoring the story as there is about the fact that it shows climate scientists manipulating data, avoiding freedom of information requests and other dastardly deeds in an attempt to convince the world that global warming is real. They’ve convinced the politicians of course: politicians see it as an excuse to tax people, something they love doing, and would accept statements about the sky being green with red squares if it allowed them to gather money from the tax payer. Apparently Google gives ten million hits (as of the writing of this post; I think it may go up) already, barely a couple of weeks after the event and ignoring  - or burying – of the story by mainstream media such as the BBC: who still only have a minor story on their website about it, with no reference to the content of the emails at all.

Global Heating Up

I’m not a believer in Global Warming, I’ve always felt that there has been a shouting of wolf rather than an examination of facts. I’m a big fan of conspiracies in fiction but more inclined to believe they are cock ups in real life.

I first saw this story -  approximately here -while reading the Telegraph during the week (I started getting it when the scum MPs were doing their daily I’ve-Done-Nothing-Wrongs and just sort of kept getting it) and followed it up online. It hit the net and spread a bit like wildfire, being reported all over the world in various newspapers, blogs and sites. Oddly enough I saw no coverage by the major media here in the UK. The rest of the world discuss it vociferously and the ramifications yet the BBC filed it away (online) as a minor break in report . Very X-Files.

Other Docs

One of my eBay purchases was out of curiosity and the book arrived today. It’s The Oz Encounter, Weird Heroes Vol. 5: Doc Phoenix. Published in the seventies and written by Marv Wolfman, a name I recognise from reading Marvel comics all those years ago. The series was created by Ted White, a noted SF writer.

They make no bones about the fact that the book and characters are homage to Doc Savage, and the novel itself is a little intriguing. Doc has to save a girl by literally going into her mind. Doc Savage certainly has spawned a lot of imitators and homage: I’ve read somewhere that even programmes like the A-Team took elements from Doc.

It also has a nice cover painting by Jeffrey Jones – love his (her now) work and have a couple of books containing it, including a paperback edition of The Studio.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to read it soon. My pile of unread books is getting bigger and bigger, and I’m also working my way through Season 3 of My Name is Earl on DVD at the same time.

Ebay bit

Great, I won Galactic Tours by Bob Shaw, illustrated by David Hardy, for only £2.99 on eBay. It’s been £10 and upward any time I’ve searched for it online. I had set a maximum bid of £9.99 for it and it turned out I was the only bidder. Max bids on eBay are quite helpful. It sets a limit.

I've yet to receive it so we'll see what condition it's in when it arrives. I haven't read it at all so this will be a new book for me. I've got more bids on other Bob Shaw books and I'm considering a few others. I'm a bit behind in posts on the Bob Shaw blog, but I don't want to post too much too soon: Bob Shaw did only write a finite amount and I doubt if there are any new works to be released. So there is only a set amount of his works that I can blog about.

WTF

Potential problems with Madasafish. I received a couple of disturbing emails on Friday and sent in a request to Madasafish to look into it straight away. I got a reply this morning but it appears the person didn't even read what I had written, so I SHOUTED BACK. Hopefully it will get sorted out but I'm not holding my breath. It might cause me troubles with my internet connection so I'll keep checking my emails regularly (it's an account I don't normally check on a daily basis) .

What is up with MYSPACE? I try to log on and find that it now doesn't support Firefox 2. I'm loathe to upgrade my edition of Firefox as the new version doesn't support the ftp plugin I have that I use to upload files to my web sites. I only sign in to MySpace (and the others) now and then anyway but it looks like it will be a little less often for MySpace.

The import of all my posts from my personal blog to the Worpress.com blog went fine. Sometimes the picture link works sometimes not, but it isn't important as I hardly ever use pictures in my blogs; the only one I do use them for is the Bob Shaw blog, and they are just links. So it looks like I've been using the blog on WordPress.com for quite a while when in actual fact I've hardly used it at all. Isn't the Internet wonderful?

Update of WordPress

Finally updated the version of WordPress in my personal blog. Not because I wanted to, well I sort of did; I wanted to use the export function available in the later versions. At least all my WordPress blogs now look the same, no confusion now about why a feature isn’t available.

I exported the file in the personal blog and imported it into the blog on Wordpress.com. Hopefully all will go well. I’ll know within a day.

It seems I can’t stay away from eBay, as I’ve put in a couple of bids for some books when I know I shouldn’t. Bad me.

Any Idiot

The problem with the Internet is that any idiot can set themselves up as a bookseller. They just create accounts for eBay Amazon etc and punt them out. Service and customer care can take a massive dip online, although there are exceptions. I’ve been caught a couple of times with Bob Shaw novels; SFBC editions instead of Gollancz editions, ex-library copies which I only find out are ex-library when they arrive.

And it’s happened again. A Bob Shaw hardback at a cheap price which turns out not to be the Gollancz edition as advertised. I now have two copies of that book, both useless to me, seeing as it would cost as much as I spent on it to send it back.

Is it too much to ask book dealers to be accurate in their descriptions? Apparently it is. They punt it out and hope for a sale, ignoring the service to customers.

I suppose it’s a case of that old saying, if it looks too good to be true it probably is. I’ll make it a policy to always enquire before purchase from now on.

(This is the first blog post to be posted to all four of my blogs.)

Added WordPress Blog

I have a WordPress blog which I’ve hardly ever used. I signed up for it so I could post comments on other blogs. That has become redundant as I used Blogger and Google reader more and more, and I haven’t touched the WordPress blog since around January this year (2009). Today I remembered it and added it to Windows Live Writer, so I can post to four blogs at the click of a mouse instead of three.

Interzone 225 arrived today, which is  a bit of a surprise seeing as I tend to not receive as many as I do get. I also donated some money to Wheatus and as it was over $25 I got a limited edition signed DVD (limited to 500 copies) and other goodies from them. It was pretty cool stuff, their new music is pretty good and I would encourage anyone to go over to their site and check them out. They are most famous for the hit Teenage Dirtbag. You can download their songs for free if you feel so inclined but even a token donation would be a good exchange for the songs. The really good thing about it all was that everything came from the hands of the band themselves. No middlemen at all.

An E. Hoffman Price novel arrived also today. I’ve never read any of his fiction and always wanted to get my hands on his stuff to check it out. I first read his writings in Skull Face Omnibus by Robert E Howard, where he gave his memories of meeting Howard. His personality came across well in that short piece and I was always on the look out for his books but very little seemed to come up at reasonable prices. So I’ve got another novel to put on the tower of Babel of books that I have to read.

Too Spendy

I’m going to have to ease off on the use of the credit card for a little while. It hasn't been much over the past few months but recent activity on eBay has been pretty constant. It’s not the purchases from eBay I mind; they are small and you don’t really think about them, it's the postage. The more or less standard charge of around £3 does bump the purchases up quite a bit. And then they all gang up and make a big dent in the credit card. And it creates a big pile of reading for me. I've got a couple of Doc Savage novels to start, one Philip José farmer novel, a facsimile of 1930s pulp magazine Strange Tales plus other bits and bobs.

Actually the facsimile made me go hunting for the real thing and I'm sorely tempted to purchase a couple of real pulp magazines. There are a few dealers out there selling original editions. Sorely tempted but wrist slapped until after Christmas at least. And I’ve got to continue the hunt to complete my Bob Shaw hardback collection.

Plus I get my car insurance renewed this month. I’ve already phoned around for the best deals and decided who I will go with this year and the payment will come off before the next statement. It’s actually cheaper than last year but as it's a relatively small figure I don’t pay it by instalments but one lump sum. I save (around twenty quid) on interest payments paying in a one off rather than monthly instalments throughout the year by doing that but it is a fair whack to pay in a one off.

Bosh Theme

Having invested some money in Artisteer I thought I should use it to create a theme for the Bob Shaw blog. While it can produce a theme from point and click only I decided to invest some time in creating some specific graphics. It’s amazing what you can do in Paint Shop Pro 5 when you have to – boy is that an awkward program to use. I got it free from PC Plus years ago. It may be awkward but it is streets ahead of the Gimp in usability; miles behind Photoshop though.

I have completed version one of the theme and uploaded it to the site and activated the theme for use in the blog. It has been tested in Firefox (my main browser) Internet Explorer (my avoid at all costs browser) and Opera (my try it out and see what it’s like browser), and it looks quite good in all of them.

No doubt I’ll tinker with it – update or change the theme – as I explore Artisteer more and more over the coming weeks.

Slow Ghost

Since I updated my edition of Norton Ghost (I have version 14 and the update for it was fifty megabytes; more than some full programs) it has been very slow when it backs up my laptop to the external USB drive. It is set to create one base back up once a month and make incremental backups in between.

Since I upgraded it has taken at least two hours for every back up irrespective if it was a base backup or incremental. I have checked the settings and it is definitely set to do the base and incremental updates. The problem is that it’s set to kick off at 10 pm, which means a midnight finish. Not the best things for Sunday night. I may have to adjust the settings – get it starting during the day for one – and see if I can adjust it so that the increments go back to taking the five or ten minutes they took before I updated the program.

Ceres Arrival

A fine hardback copy of The Ceres Solution arrived today. The number of Bob Shaw hardbacks for me to get dwindles constantly. The book cost £5.95 net it was when originally released way back in 1981, two or three years before I got into Bob Shaw via his short story collection A Better Mantrap. I hope to get the hardback edition for a decent price one day but, seeing as there are only a couple of ex library editions at ridiculous prices available online, I wont hold my breath. Perhaps things will change in the future: the internet is full of change, a couple of months ago I couldn't see me buying The Ceres Solution in hardback – at all, let alone at the reasonable price I bought it for.

Ceres Arrival

A fine hardback copy of The Ceres Solution arrived today. The number of Bob Shaw hardbacks for me to get dwindles constantly. The book cost £5.95 net it was when originally released way back in 1981, two or three years before I got into Bob Shaw via his short story collection A Better Mantrap. I hope to get the hardback edition for a decent price one day but, seeing as there are only a couple of ex library editions at ridiculous prices available online, I wont hold my breath. Perhaps things will change in the future: the internet is full of change, a couple of months ago I couldn't see me buying The Ceres Solution in hardback – at all, let alone the reasonable price I bought it for.

Ups and Downs

With music and software. I came across Artisteer and was very impressed with it, so much so that I forked out my hard (ish) earned cash for the cheapest edition; $49, just over £30. It’s a great little program that creates WordPress themes at the push of a button. The pro edition had features that I didn’t need or want, in particular additional export formats. But what turns out to be in the pro edition which isn’t in the standard edition are dialogs for adjusting the templates. A bit mean of them I think. It’s like getting a version of Word that doesn’t have a page set up or print preview.

I bought Kerrang! for the first time in many many years. I used to get it quite regularly when I was younger. Always like the noisy stuff. The magazine was disposable; I only have one copy of it, and that one I kept because there was a review of a Gamma concert I was at.

What made me purchase this issue was that there was a promo to get a 4 track download by Biffy Clyro. I like them a fair bit and have bought their music in the form of downloads from 7 digital and other sites. With the Kerrang! tracks you gave them an email address and typed in a number from a card and got the free tracks. Well, I say tracks but it was one track only: the back of the card – only visible after I bought the magazine and removed the card from the plastic wrapper – informed me there was a limited amount of downloads. The four tracks available to the first 2,000 only. Two tracks for the next thousand and one track to the final 2,500. I was among the last 2,500 but felt cheated so I didn’t bother downloading.

Kerrang should have made it more clear the downloads were limited but no, they splashed ‘FREE Biffy Clyro 4-Track download’ on their front cover. It looks like it’ll be years and years before I buy that magazine again.

Ship Of Strangers, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02482-8

I’ve managed to recreate some of this after Word decided to chew up previous versions and spit out corrupt files, but most of it is new, and all blogs are copied into text files in case Word gets further ideas.

I remember buying Ship of Strangers in Pan paperback in Edinburgh and I was looking forward to reading it; it seemed to be good old fashioned story based science fiction with alien monsters and people on deep space exploration, with weird and wild happenings where wacky hijinks ensue.

The first thing to note about Ship of Strangers is that it isn’t truly a novel. Like Other Days, Other Eyes it is a novel made up of original material and additional stories that were previously published in magazines; in this case stories that appeared in If, Analog and Universe during the seventies. The book is dedicated to A E Van Vogt. Bob Shaw has done a good job of weaving the previously published material and new material together to form an enjoyable romp through the galaxies.

The episodic nature of Ship of Strangers doesn’t detract from enjoying it as a whole and is a little closer to adventures of daring do than is Shaw’s normal novel content where characterisation enhances the plot quite a bit. With the episodic nature of the book, and the fact that parts were previously published, characterisation takes a bit of a back seat to story.

The first few chapters deal with an alien that can change its shape and does just that, by taking the form of a survey module. The ship and its crew face a problem as six vehicles are sent out and seven return. There follows a cat and mouse game with the alien as the crew try to work out what are the real vehicles and what is the wolf in the midst. The twist is that the alien can exert mind control over humans, which turns out to be important when the Captain makes the decision as to which vehicle is the fake.

Personal tensions resulting from the use of Trance-Ports – dream controllers which can appear to be very lifelike and ongoing - are next up and Surgenor (a nod to Sturgeon from Bob Shaw?), the main protagonist of the novel, warns the Captain that things can turn ugly if matters aren’t brought into check. Things escalate between crew members, with Surgenor and others being exposed to the Trance-Port tape – against his will. This part of the story brings out a little more of Surgenor’s character and adds some depth to him.

Next up are ancient weapons activated by accident which then become a threat to a member of the crew. It sounds a bit clichéd I know; the plot has been used more than once in one form or another and not only in Science Fiction. Bob Shaw puts in a little danger and tension and some humour to round off this portion of the novel. It was a little too action orientated and could have explored the ancient civilisations a little more but it was well written nonetheless.

This brings us to about halfway through the novel, and chapter eight begins with some info dump about the world where the stories are taking place. It also introduces some military personnel as the Sarafand, the ship that is at the centre of the novel, is on a planet in a joint mission with the military vessel Admiral Carpenter. They are on a planet where an alien race is, the Saladinians, and, unknown to Surgenor, the military are about to kidnap one of them. The only problem is that the Saladinians can freely travel through time.

Next for Surgenor is the introduction of a female crew member to add to his problems. Something goes wrong with the next space jump and things heat up as they find themselves lost and have to work out where they are. They do but don’t like the answer they get. Things look bleak as they discover they are outside of the known universe and could die in a few hours.

For someone looking for a good satisfying novel to get into the episodic nature of Ship of Strangers could put them off. It isn’t by far Bob Shaw’s best work but it is inventive, energetic and a good read.