Bluddy Freezing

Outside that is. I’m sitting in front of a nice hot coal fire. Third bad winter in a row here in the old yuckie but this one seems to be the worst because it is the coldest. A couple of times it has come close to frozen pipes but they haven’t as yet fingers crossed). The car regularly showed temperatures of minus six to minus eight. It’s supposed to be worse tonight, with temperatures going down to minus 14. There’s a wind here tonight which makes it that little bit colder.

The laptop is now starting to show signs of wear and tear. Two keys don’t work anymore. I don’t know when they stopped working but i noticed a week or so ago. The right shift button and the left arrow just underneath it don’t work anymore. But it doesn’t make the laptop unusable. I’m off work until the New Year so in theory I’ll be able to finish the posts I have that are three quarters done for the Bob Shaw blog and get some activity there again. but breath wont be held, particularly in this cold weather.

Afrur’s Here

Arfur who? Arfur Phuxzake! Dear or dear that was bad. I haven’t blogged in ages, just never had the inclination lately. I have more or less finished a couple of posts for the Bob Shaw blog but haven’t put those up either. Just in my lazy period I guess.

The snow has arrived early, and it hit us bad. We have at least 1 1/2 to 2 feet of snow. Today (Thursday) was the first time that I could use the car in anger. The roads have been pretty bad but the paths have been worse; un-walk able most of them, which meant walking on the roads most of the time. luckily there was little traffic. A lot of shops near here haven’t been getting deliveries, so milk bread and the like have been a bit thin on the ground, but stuff gets through eventually – except the papers one day last week. It has been bitterly cold and I’m dreading the heating bills which will arrive January/February time.

I ordered this by Philip Jose Farmer ages ago and it’s due to get sent out any day now, although with the weather supposedly getting bad in the UK next week again I might not get it until the New Year, if at all – an item from eBay hasn’t turned up yet.

I also treated myself to these from Robert E Howard. The prices are ok-ish for limited edition books but the postage was very steep.

I’m getting a little pissed of with Google Chrome. I have Firefox 2 on my USB stick but a lot of sites say it is unsupported now, and I get some trouble from some sites I visit using it. So I install Chrome, which is supposed to be slick and fast – it is neither. The amount of times I have seen ‘waiting for cache’ on the bottom left hand of the window. … It’s extremely slow. It seems to clog up memory and slow other programs too. If I was paranoid I’d say Google were piping traffic through their own servers to gather data. I wouldn’t put it past them but I suppose I shouldn’t be so suspicious either.

Oddities

There is a great viral video going round purporting to be a time traveller using a mobile phone back in 1928. The actual footage is only a few seconds long so kudos to the guy for getting an eight minute video out of it. (The action starts about two and a half minutes in for anyone wishing to skip the waffle.)

It’s highly unlikely it is a time traveller, highly unlikely they are using a mobile phone but it is fun, and a lot of idiots are proving themselves as idiots with comments on various websites, blogs and forums. Of course, the original film would put everything to rest as it would be much higher level of detail than a DVD rip and everything would be seen more clearly.

My theory is that Doc Savage and his crew were in town on a case. Doc and his crew had access to technology decades before the average person; Doc inventing most of it. Their adventures officially began in 1931 but they knew each other long before this, and no doubt were involved in lots of scrapes before the magazine hit the newsstands. This one involved Monk having to put on women’s clothing to avoid detection while he trailed someone, no doubt reporting back to Doc, Ham, Renny, Long Tom or Johnny via two way radio. Only Monk finds himself going past the premier of Charlie Chaplin’s new movie, The Circus, where a cameraman is filming.

I was involved in the great broadband drop at the weekend. I couldn’t access the world wide wobbly on Friday but all was restored on Saturday morning. BT’s Edinburgh data centre went puff and apparently this caused the central belt of Scotland, parts of Yorkshire and parts of Northern Ireland to be denied access to the internet.

Bought H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2 after reading a review of one of his stories. That particular story isn’t in the collection but it’s a reasonable collection: pretty much a three in one. There’s the main bulk of short stories, some early work and fragments and finally Lovecraft’s legendary non fiction piece about horror in literature, which is practically novel length in itself. I’ve read a couple of the stories before but got into a few and they’re ok, though not spectacular. The good thing is that a lot of the stories are short, six to ten pages. Good for dipping into regularly.

Second Hand Bookshops

I had occasion to visit Burntisland today. On eventually finding parking I noticed a bookshop right in front on me. It was a surprise as I didn’t think there were any more second hand book shops left in Fife (excluding St Andrews: that’s a university town – and posh) so as soon as my business was concluded I dove straight over for a gander.

They’re also online, but the picture on the web site doesn’t do it justice. For a start there were books outside, at the door and in front of one of the windows. And they weren’t nicked! Burntisland is your proverbial quaint old town; the roads are very narrow, not having been designed for cars, and the place could fit into the fifties no problem.

The book shop itself is stacked with all sorts – the website says they are strong on SF and Fantasy – and there was a section downstairs also.

I ended up spending £30 on ten books, including a paperback version of Bob Shaw’s The Two Timers. Some of the book prices were quite high – there was a basket with Robert E Howard books that interested me until I opened them up and saw the prices; up to £15 for some paperbacks – but there were also a lot of bargains too.

I got a few books from people I have never heard of: John Sylvester, Master of The World, hard back; Adam Roberts, Polystom, Hardback; John B Spencer, Quake City, Paperback, and some from liked authors: The Best of, Clifford D Simak, paperback, Two Timers, Bob Shaw, paperback, The White Dragon, Anne McCafferey, paperback. The last I’m sure I bought before as the cover looks very familiar.

I’m not sure how long I spend browsing but it must have been at least an hour, and well worth it too.

And I find

That my personal blog is down for some reason. It is on the same site as the Bosh Blog and that is fine, dandy and smiling at the world. Ho Hum. More bugs to splat I suppose.

Totally Cool

Been inactive with all blogs recently. Not had much time to blog lately, and not much time surfing the web either. But I did come across this via a post at Techdirt (from inside GoogleReader), and it is totally cool. More of this sort of thing should be encouraged.

I was shocked at last week’s ‘release’ of a campaign video by 10:10 called No Pressure. I say ‘release’ as it was withdrawn on the same day they told the world about it. They’ve lost all but one of their sponsors and are getting kicked by both sides for it. I wont link to it as it’s very graphic and probably upsetting, but it can be easily found on the web, youtube and other video sites. There’s all sorts of parodies flying around the web, including a couple of Hitler parodies. It really was a shot in the foot for the green movement.

Bluddy L 2: The Bloat

I had recovered a computer not used in years. Eventually I managed to get XP to repair it and it worked fine for a few days and I could access old programs, in particular Sophocles 2003. However there was a persistent and annoying software fault which no amount of searching online seemed to find a fix for. I have Sophocles 2007, and the registry settings to ensure I don't lose access to that program now the company has disappeared from the world, so the 2003 version is a little surplus to requirements. There wasn't anything else of worth on that computer so there was no reason not to do a full re install. So I took the plunge and just did a full clean reinstall of Windows XP. I took a back-up of the drivers first using Driver Genius Pro 2005 and copied a lot of other things to the portable USB drive before commencing on the clean re install.

It all went fine. Done in under an hour, activated and loading speedily. I restored the drivers, installed a couple of programs and then we went down the path of getting the OS up to date with patches and updates.

When I started Windows took up 2.6 Gig of the hard disk. When I finished all the updates (which again took the best part of six hours) the space used was up to 9.1 gigabytes.

Fair enough, this was a full update, skipping no patches or upgrades. A couple failed and I didn't update the graphics card driver (I did this first time round when the computer was 'repaired' and the graphics went haywire) but this is still a lot of hard disk space to relinquish.

Many megabytes of bandwidth and a threefold increase in space, and it's taking a lot longer to load up. Was it worth it? I ask myself.

Update, update, update

That’s all the new/old computer does. It’s currently working it’s way through 58 of them, and it did at least 30 on Friday. It has been idle for about three years so it does have a lot of catching up to do.

And I tracked the CD/DVD problem down to software – or to be more accurate the lack of software. It happens when I uninstall software. But as I uninstalled about four or five packages at the one time I can’t point an accurate finger at the culprit. And I’m not inclined to uninstall them one at a time to find out which one is causing the problem. I can live with a few programs that I hardly ever use sitting on my hard drive.

I haven’t been reading much of late – a little too busy with other things – but I’ll try and catch up; or at least complete the short story collections I’m working through. I found a great writer that has really impressed me. Rhys Hughes. He has a story in the Philip Jose Farmer collection The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer and I bought one of his books on the strength of it. The Postmodern Mariner. It’s a collection of short stories and I have honestly enjoyed all that I have read so far. I can’t say that for every collection. Mostly I enjoy one or two, sometimes several, but there’s always a story that doesn’t quite hit it in every collection. But I haven’t come across it yet in The Postmodern Mariner.

I tried again to recover files from the U3 flash drive but no luck. I sent a couple of letters off by registered post last week and they weren’t in the back up before I lost/destroyed the USB drive. I have a print out of one but not the other. The program I used to hunt through the deleted files found all sorts, but not the files I was looking for. It found files from years ago but not a few days ago. And some of the dates on the files it did find were weird. 2135 and such.

I close this post with the old/new computer only on number 28 of the 58 updates.

One Up, One Down

I recently had some spare time and worked on an old desktop. It constantly rebooted and I didn't know if it was a hardware or a software problem. Trying to get Windows repaired didn't work, and other hard disks just caused it to not recognise any attached hardware. But I eventually managed to get it to offer me a repair option when I was using the original Windows disk after much gnashing of teeth working with other programs and fixes found on the Internet. This eventually led to a Windows repair which was basically a reinstall, with me entering the key and then online activation. The computer then booted up and within a few minutes I was looking at the contents of a hard drive that hadn’t been used since 2007. It is a pretty good spec computer too, even though it’s three or four years old.

I was quite pleased with myself.

Of course, the gods wouldn’t let it lie.

Today on my laptop my U3 disk wouldn’t load. Here we go I think, it's finally snuffed it. I had recently bought a four gigabyte one as a replacement because the one I have been using the past few years was giving some errors here and there and felt very fragile. The program wouldn’t load but the drive was still accessible. So I play around with that. I copy all the files to the c disk of the laptop and fiddle around with the U3 drive. No luck. It would not load any portable programs and the files downloaded from Sandisk wouldn't recognise the USB disk as a U3 drive.

I even tried programs from the temporary folder on the laptop hard disk but they wouldn’t work either. I reformat the drive and try to reinstall. No dice.

It’s about this time I realise it isn’t the fault of the U3 drive but the laptop. It is not recognising CD/DVD drives: not the internal one, not the external one and not the USB one. A quick check of the system shows me that it can’t find or load the drivers. Vista couldn’t find any drivers online or any solutions to the problem.

Ghost I think, it's saved my bacon before. And, without thought, I load the Ghost CD and restore the laptop to last week. It's halfway through when I realise that I hadn’t copied back the files for the U3 from the laptop c drive.

Norton Ghost does a ninety nine percent job of restoring the drive. I get a blue screen and then some Vista program called System Repair or something appears, spends ten minutes doing nothing and then loads the computer up. It's back to the way it was last Sunday, but seeing as I don’t keep any files on the laptop that's ok.

They’re all on the USB. Which has been re-formatted.

The recovery programs I tried were rubbish, listing only files with numbers. And there’s no way I’m going through four thousand files and renaming them. So I turn back to the backup disk and unzip the back up of the USB. I back that up manually using my copy of SecureZip. As it’s a manual backup by me it’s not as regular as the machine backup by Ghost. The latest I have is from late last month so I’ve lost about two weeks worth of information but it’s better than losing everything.

But I’ve got my old computer back again, and I might use that for a few things. Antics now has a workaround via the forum and I might stick Antics on the old computer - I did purchase the parts and build it to high specs so I could run Antics on it. And as I said earlier even though its three years old it’s still good specs: 2 gig of RAM, 2.4 gig processor, 250 gig hard drive, graphics card. That’s an OK spec even for now. It runs Windows XP which I still prefer over Vista and – as I made a point of never installing unnecessary software on that computer – it still loads and runs blindingly fast.

Another plus is that computer is where I have the program Sophocles. I bought it and then a few years later the company disappeared altogether. The software was Internet activated; you got a code from the guy and all the features were then enabled. And he was quite cool in that you could go back to him any number of times for another number. I only had two numbers; the one for the computer and another for the new (at that time) beta edition of the software.

When the software disappeared the Internet came to the rescue with a way to ‘activate’ on other computers, which involved saving out the registry entries. This allowed me to ensure that I can still use the software but only the beta version as I couldn’t access the original version on the old desktop computer. Now I can and I will save out the registry information so that if the computer goes down again at least I can continue to use that piece of software.

Bluddy L

What happened to August? One minute it was there, all fresh and new, the next it’s almost gone. It has been a really quick month. What makes it even more ironic is that I have done very little of note during the month. I haven't been online too much - but still managed to clock up half the allocated bandwidth for a month, although that was mostly upgrades of software - and have had little time to do anything else.

Finances are a little to the fore at the moment. I'm trying to cut back on spending everywhere but I did splash out on an upgrade to LifeForms. I visited their website and noticed it had been redesigned since the last time I was there. So, I checked the software. Huzzah, new version out.

I went from version 4 to version 5. I first got a version of this software free from a magazine yonks ago. Last year I purchased the full version and, although it is a great piece of software, version 4 was old and worked best in Windows 98:  it gave some errors in Vista.

The new version has been updated to work well in the newer operating systems but the interface is the same old friendly one I'm familiar with. And the upgrade was very cheap too.

I'm going to look into the blogs I follow and see if I can prune them back a little. It seems some of them I hardly read at the moment. And since I moved to using Google Reader for following blogs I hardly ever comment on blogs now. I pruned the blog list a few months back and although I haven't added any recently it's time to look at them again.

Sneaky Waterstone's

I was all set to walk past Waterstone's today. I've spent a lot on books recently and some are still to be read. In fact my to read pile is pretty high now, and in danger of toppling over. Plus I've got a paperback to arrive, and I've subscribed to CrimeWave with an additional novella still to come.  So, I had already decided that I wouldn't be tempted by Waterstone’s and not even go into the shop for a browse. However, the buggers are sly.

Passing the shop I noticed through the window that all paperbacks are 3 for 2, even all science fiction paperbacks. So I went in and had a look. They have changed a lot of their stock too. I looked at PK Dick books but there was only Do Androids ... which I already have. I remember seeing Rendezvous at Rama by Arthur Clarke some weeks ago and nearly bought it but there was no sign of it this week. None of the Classic SF interested me either. As usual a lot of the SF was actually Fantasy and I’ve never been much into that.

I had a look around the crime and mainstream sections too but there wasn't much of interest, so I went back to the SF section and bought three Neal Asher books. I've enjoyed what I've read from him so far. So for my three for two I bought Line War, Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion. At the moment I'm halfway through an old pulp, The Spider - I got a reprint of two novels from eBay for under a fiver including postage - but I think I'll let myself sink into one of Asher's novels afterword.

The Peace Machine, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-03582-X

A little lacking in posts this month. The following has been ninety percent finished but has been sitting on my USB portable drive for close to a month. The good news is that I can get two posts out of it.

This is one of my favourite Bob Shaw novels, whether it is called Ground Zero Man or The Peace Machine. I first read it in paperback as Ground Zero Man and it fairly rolls along. It’s a cracking read and in my opinion is Shaw at his peak as a writer. The update, issued in hardback by Gollancz as The Peace Machine in 1985, is more or less Ground Zero Man with some updates on a topical references such as television shows – although they are now ancient history references to televisions shows.

Shaw mentioned this novel in his HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION Book, making a comment that some people thought he should move into thrillers on the basis of this book. And I agree that Shaw would have made a good thriller writer. At his best Shaw is not only a master at plotting but also a master at building suspense and piling the pressure on his characters.

It starts off intriguingly, with the main character telling us ‘My finger rests lightly on the black button’ and who wouldn’t be intrigued by that?

The rest of the novel is in the third person and brings us answers to questions posed in the prologue. Lucas Hutchman is staring at a piece of paper and finds himself in a cold sweat. He is in his office and despite interruptions from other people the thought dancing through his head and filling him with excitement and some fear is ‘I can make neutrons dance to a new tune’. Hutchman takes the afternoon off and as he drives home we get an inkling into his marriage and the personality of his wife, and while he is pursuing his hobby of archery we learn that his ability to control neutrons meant he could build a nuclear machine; one that Hutchman insisted would be an anti war machine.

Then comes the news that Damascus is in flames because a nuclear bomb exploded over the city. This affects Hutchman deeply and deepens his resolution to create the machine that will stop all governments from keeping nuclear weapons. As his relationship with his wife goes back and forth Hutchman commences the project of building a machine that he hopes will bring peace to the world. Hutchman too goes back and forth about the Peace Machine; if he can be brave enough to use it or if he knew deep in his heart that he would never cross that line.

The decision is taken from his hands and Hutchman by the actions of his wife and Hutchman is put on a path that eventually brings him to the attention of the authorities. Intrigue, kidnaps and deaths follow as Hutchman tries to stay ahead of the authorities and use his invention to save the world from itself.

I found it a very enjoyable novel when I first read it in paperback and equally enjoyable when I read the updated and revised edition in Gollancz hardback when it was reissued in 1985. As I’ve said I feel this is Bob Shaw at his finest. The writing is crisp and elegant, the book is well plotted and the characters feel real, even minor characters. The situation isn’t as relevant or as oppressing as it was in the seventies when it was first issued and in the eighties when it was re issued. Nineteen eighty five was a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall and the USSR. After the fall of the USSR nuclear weapons and the nuclear standoff that is pivotal in this novel more or less disappeared. Nowadays the enemy is a lot more difficult to identify and no one knows where to point their nuclear weapons.

The epilogue to the book, like the prologue, is in the first person, and the book ends a little pessimistically but this doesn’t detract from any aspect of the book and is, in a way, quite fitting.

Portable Probs.

My U3 portable drive has been acting up a little lately, and it feels loose and ready to fall apart. I’ll use it for as long as I can but I’ve invested in a new drive for under a tenner as a replacement.

I bought another Sandisk Cruzer drive but the U3 installer insists that it isn’t and turned its nose up at it, refusing to acknowledge its existence let alone install the program on it. So I installed the free portableapps menu on it and copied over files and documents. It meant downloading some programmes again in portable app format instead of U3 format and that ran away with a fair amount of bandwidth, but it does come with its own backup program. On the U3 drive the program that I use to backup comes in two flavours, low volume free and unlimited paid for.

One of the good things about using the portable apps instead of U3 is that it lead me to a site where there was a program that allowed you to use Windows Live Writer on a portable drive – I’m using it to write this post – along with a few other programs I looked at before but never tried. Unlike U3 – the U3 website has totally gone now and I don’t think it will be back – all the portable apps programs are free. U3 had a lot of free programs but also a lot were paid for. The prices for the programs ranged from dirt cheap to bloody extortionate.

I haven’t read a novel in weeks. The last one was Ghosts of Manhattan, a pretty decent story of a hero in an alternate world at the early part of last century, even if it was about a third too long. (It was while reading that book that I noticed –some- books nowadays have at least 1 1/2 line spacing and not single line spacing: when did that start and how come I didn’t notice it before?) Since then it’s been short stories all the way; the Captain Midnight hardback edition  (paperback edition) ordered a few months ago has arrived, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions signed by six contributors also arrived this week and I’ve dipped into that, and the latest issue of Interzone dropped through my letterbox this week too.

Virus! Arrgh!

Well, more a serious malware program to be accurate. I came across something like it before at work. It stops anti-virus and malware programs from running so they can’t remove it from your system.  The one I experienced before didn’t stop web browsers so I could go online with information about it and find a way to remove it. The one that recently infected my machine was worse: I couldn’t reboot the machine successfully, or even load Windows in Safe Mode.

Norton Ghost came to the rescue. I slapped in the disk and loaded it up, less than an hour later my computer was in the state it was five days previous. It does automatic backups every Sunday and am I glad of those? Yes I am.

I checked the programs I have on the computer – some of them are dependent on activation – and they all ran fine. A little weird in that the Windows update history is completely gone. My computer says it is up to date but there is no list of all the updates that have been installed over the years.

And as I store all documents on my U3 disk I don’t have to worry about losing any recent files.

I never found out what the malware/virus was. I have malwarebytes on the system which I run every now and then. I’ll get a couple more as a precaution, maybe try and find one that works in real time. I’ll also see about getting a different firewall and not relying on the one that comes from Microsoft. Although it’s good it’s sort of anonymous and so a little unnerving as I’m unsure of what it’s blocking and what it’s letting through.

Book Binge

I didn’t mean to but I went on a sort of book binge today. I happened to be in a WHS today and browsing through it noticed they had a clearance on some books. I picked up an Ursula K Le Guin collection of short stories for two pounds; The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Hopefully it will be more interesting than the previous collection of hers I picked up where I couldn’t get into any of the stories. I also picked up a novel set in ancient Rome for a pound and two Ben Elton novels for a pound each – they were sold together. Four books for a fiver. Not bad.

Then, minutes later, in Waterstone’s, I pick up another three for two. Right in front of me as I walk into the store was a signed edition of Transition by Iain Banks. No M in the name but it deals with parallel worlds and the time between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. I remember it had some mixed reviews when it came out last year but it sounded interesting enough for me to pick it up and give it a try.

Although, as it’s a signed copy, perhaps I should keep it pristine (?). More than likely it was a batch lot signed by Iain Banks for Waterstone’s, or for the publishers to distribute to booksellers. But, seeing as he lives a stone’s throw from Kirkcaldy (or, as he has been quoted as saying – with Kirkcaldy being in the constituency of Smiler Brown – a ‘mortar lob away’:) ) there is a also every chance the shop got copies signed by him direct.

The three for two was rounded off with another collection of short stories (supposed to be as rare as hen’s teeth nowadays as short stories ‘don’t sell’ but I’ve picked up a few main stream collections recently) and the 5oth anniversary edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the one I got ‘free’.

Also I have a copy of The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer to be winging its way across the Atlantic any day now. This is a collection mostly about Philip Jose Farmer and is a limited edition. I’ve been told my copy is number 128 and it’s being signed by the authors attending FarmerCon V.

It seems like I spent most of my time online updating laptops, which for some reason seems to take at least half an hour per update. There is the downloading of the updates then the installing of the updates and then the obligatory reboot; nine times out of ten after install of updates I was informed there were further updates available. And round it went.

Blogger re design

I tried to change the design of this blog a couple of times with Artisteer. The program works great with Wordpress but not so good with Blogger. It uploads all the files ok and the site appears for a second and then the whole site disappears from view while it goes searching for something. And it continues to search for a very long time. So I just chose another design within Blogger. The designing in Blogger has changed since the last time I used it.

It's not as straight forward as Worpress, the export to Blogger in Artisteer was a little more complicated and involved copy and paste of code - the second time; no such option was given  on the first attempt to change the Blogger theme. I'll stick to the inbuilt options for Blogger and use Artisteer for Wordpress only.

Warren Peace, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04918-9

Warren Peace was published by Gollancz in hardback in 1993 but renamed as ‘Dimensions’ when it came out as a paperback – also published by Gollancz in the UK. It is the sequel to Who Goes Here?

I had this short review all ready until I realised something: it is also the last novel that Bob Shaw published. It has been said that Shaw went through a period of writer’s block: indeed during the eighties and nineties Shaw released revised and updated versions of his works. For books like Ground Zero Man and The Shadow of Heaven this may have been justified as they had limited releases in the UK on their first outing. For a while Shaw issued a book a year: indeed during the seventies there were sometimes two per year, with the latter part of the seventies perhaps his most productive time.

Although saying Warren Peace is a sequel may not be entirely accurate as the book takes the story, characters and situation to a different level.

Peace is now one of the Oscars, the elite Golden Supermen who have no need for food, drink or sex. But Warren is not happy with his situation. In fact he is bored rigid. We meet him on the eighth day of the Oscar Galactic Jamboree and he is not having any fun at all. Luckily for Warren he comes across a group of criminals who are getting ready to attack the Oscars.

Warren thinks the plan is to strand the Oscars on the planet but the big glowing purple rock that is dropped on them and kicked away into space by Warren has more implications.

The rock turns out to have been Pryktonite, which for Oscars is a fate worse than death – it turns them back into human beings.

The Oscars quickly deduce that this is the work of the Galaxies greatest villain, Jeeves. Jeeves has evaded the Oscars by reverting to his nice side any time he is captured. However, his evil side will want revenge on the person who foiled his plan to eliminate the Oscars: Warren Peace.

The Oscars want to protect Warren but Warren doesn’t want to be bored to death by their lifestyle. He is still kept within the Oscars but sent to worlds where the Oscars can’t do much. His first job is at the sea planet Golborne where he has to work out what exactly is the alien porn that keeps turning on the workers called squelchers.

It is on this planet that Peace is caught in an elaborate trap laid out by Jeeves, who, in classic villain style, explains the trap to Peace. It seems that Jeeves’ assistant, Wimpole, didn’t get the black holes needed for the plan but instead got Puce Holes, which have an entirely different effect.

Peace thinks he has only been displaced in space due to the actions of Jeeves. His ship is lost in waters as he lands. The situation becomes confusing as Warren tries to figure out where and when he is without making the locals suspicious – it doesn’t work as the local Landlord gets angry at Warren a couple of times; the threat of violence which he manages to extricate himself from.

Warren quickly concludes that he is in another universe, where time and circumstances were different and society grew in a different direction. His next step was to go to Manchester, where they built spaceships. Warren gets a job as a draughtsman and his next plan is to work out how to get back to his universe and tackle Jeeves.

To be honest the book is a bit of a mish-mash, and I think Shaw padded it out with a couple of short stories from elsewhere as the first part of the book is a little episodic, something similar to Ship of Strangers which was a novel created from previously published short stories.

This doesn’t stop it being tremendously enjoyable – although not quite as funny as the predecessor Who Goes Here – particularly when Warren finds himself in an alternate world with a close to Victorian society. Personally I found too many situation changes for my liking. Generally there is only one real twist in most novels, which should occur halfway through. With Warren Peace there are a couple which, although it doesn’t spoil enjoyment of the book, didn’t ring right either.

This may have worked a little better if it wasn’t linked to Who Goes Here? An entirely separate hero going through the latter half of the novel may have been more entertaining and rewarding. Certainly the predicament Warren finds himself in halfway through the novel is very far removed from the central premise and the central threat of Jeeves.

The Jeeves/Oscar storyline could have been issued on its own and the time/alternate universe story could easily have stood on its own.

But we have this novel from Bob Shaw, his last. Not by any means his best but a good solid novel revisiting familiar characters and exploring high concept ideas. The alternate universe was well drawn and well thought out and would have been fun to explore further.

Upgrades

I upgraded the laptop today with more memory. It arrived quite quickly and was no problem installing. Switched the laptop on and the new memory worked like a dream.  Although there is a notable difference with most of the programs one is giving an error since the memory was installed. I'm not too bothered as it is a program that I hardly use, and I got it free from a computer magazine about four or five years ago.

Still getting problems with Firefox V2 so I downloaded and installed the portable version of Google Chrome. When I first tried it Chrome it wouldn't open several sites, including ansible.co.uk, u3.com, and a few others but since then I have been able to access some of them. U3 dot com hasn’t been available for the last few times I’ve tried to access it and maybe it’s gone for good. This is a shame as it’s about the only place where I can get official U3 software which, in my opinion, is far superior to Portable App software.

I’ve tried Chrome and it’s ok; not as fast as people say it is and it doesn’t have any menus. It imported the Firefox bookmarks no problem but I’ve still to get the saved passwords into it. Even though it’s portable the default setting for importing is to look at the browser on the hard drive.

I use Windows Live Writer for blogging (write once blog many times) and I’ve also upgraded that by adding other Windows Live components. The main one being Windows Live Mail. Again it’s quite good. I added a few email addresses and it went and got the emails with no problems – Yahoo involved only entering the email address and password, no POP3 settings or outgoing mail server requests that you get from other email programs.

Screening

Not been online much lately. Just bits here and there.

There was a crack on the screen of one of my laptops. I'd looked into getting it sent off to be repaired but the prices that were being charged would have made it cheaper to buy a new laptop.

Then I started looking into prices of replacement screens alone and it was there that the prices plummeted. Provided I was willing to change the screen myself the cost was a pittance; less than half the price of some 'repairs'.

So I ordered a replacement screen and looked up some tutorials on YouTube. At first there was a little trepidation: although I've built computer systems from scratch for myself and friends laptops are apparently a totally different ballgame.

And they are.

Apart from fiddling around with lots of tiny screws changing the screen involved taking out two plugs and putting in two plugs. Simples. The laptop is better than new, the replacement screen being brighter and with more vibrant colours. To celebrate I even bought extra memory from Amazon. So the laptop wont just look better but should work faster too.

I'm still going through books of short stories. I picked up an Ursula Le Guin collection from Amazon for under a fiver. It only has five stories so they're technically closer to novellas and novelettes than short stories. Still to get into them: going through one I was reminded of why I was a little turned off from Le Guin the last time I tried to read her work - which was a big thick book - and that is that there were snippets of music in the stories. Personally I found that distracting. I don't read music. It's as annoying as reading through a story to suddenly find a quote in a foreign language that is not explained. It gives the reader a little kick which dislodges them from the narrative; and that defeats the purpose of telling a story to someone.

I bought a Robert E Howard book of short stories about a year or so ago. It was only £2.99. When I got it I saw I had read a lot of the stories in it but there were a few that I hadn't read so I dipped into it now and then. Recently I chose a couple of stories here and there. One I read again was 'Pigeons From Hell'. I think I first read this years ago when I got The First (or it may have been The Second) Book of Robert E Howard in American paperback.

I don't care what anyone says, 'Pigeons From Hell' is without doubt the best thing Howard ever wrote. It surpasses Conan, Solomon Kane or anything else: his weird fiction, his sword and sorcery, his westerns. It is pure genius. Storytelling, atmosphere, horror. It's a damn near perfect story, and pretty chilling too.

Who Goes Here?, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02347-3

I bought Who Goes Here in the Ace paperback edition and enjoyed it immensely when I first read it.  This is a good old fashioned comedy romp through space and alien worlds with funny situations and some inventiveness from Bob Shaw in the form of space travel, aliens and wacky characters.

Who Goes Here was first published in 1977 and was good enough to warrant a sequel, Dimensions, also published as Warren Peace.

Warren Peace, the hero of this book, wakes up to a pretty nurse who asks him if he feels better. He does but he is a little confused. Slowly it is brought to his attention that he has signed up for thirty years* service of the Space Legion. Questioning why he would be stupid enough to sign up to the Space Legion he is answered with another question: Why did people sign up to the French Foreign Legion? To forget he tells Captain Widget.

And that’s the same reason people join the Space Legion; to forget. And the Space Legion has a machine that removes memories so people do forget.

Unfortunately for Warren Peace he seems to have forgotten everything.

Everyone that he subsequently meets responds to this with ‘You must have been a monster!’

Peace doesn’t believe he has signed up for the Space Legion, until he sees himself on video doing exactly that, and he also sees his signature on the contract.

Peace soon finds that there are precautions built into the system to stop recent recruits defaulting on contracts or trying to disobey. Each recruit has a Mark Three command enforcer surgically implanted in them. It adds harmonics to the voice which ensures ‘absolute, unthinking obedience’.

One of the funniest scenes for me was when Peace decided to get out of the situation by getting a hulking great Sergeant mad at him. It’s a great pay off to the situation which I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t yet read the book.

Peace finds himself and his new friends in the 203 Regiment, sponsored by Triple Ess; Savoury Shrimp Sauce, and soon they are onto basic training – with some of them still harbouring plots of escape – which consists of pulling the trigger on their weapons and hitting the target. Peace and the rest of the group – the Fort Eccles class of ten am – were then shipped out.

Peace is annoyed at the wait when they are in a long narrow room with benches, waiting for the transfer to the tall ships for space travel to the stars; so much so that to the at first humorous delight of the others he tries to open the door of the room. It is then, with his friends sitting on his chest after having stopped his attempt to open the door, that peace finds out they are in the ship, and that it is hurtling through space as they speak using ‘Non-Elucidean tachyon displacement’. Or instant matter transmission.

Not across vast distances but only a few hundred metres: the ship transmits itself forward a few hundred metres to the receiver at the other end.

They find themselves thrown straight into the action under the command of the youthful Lieutenant Merriman.

Warren finds out his weapon isn’t as effective as he was told it was; however he not only survives but gets himself a prisoner of war. And there is the first mention of the ‘throwrugs and the Oscars’. And no the Oscars aren’t an award. The capture of a prisoner means that Peace and the rest of the unit are considered too good for this battle, and are shipped out to Threlkeld, a planet without intelligent species and where the only job of the Legion is to make the jungles safe for miners

However, Peace wants out, and he wants to rediscover his past, find out who he is and why all his memory was wiped. It’s on Threlkeld that Peace devises his plan to escape from the Legion, and with a little buttering up of Merriman – from whom he gets the broadcast frequency of the voice command enforcer – he can create a device which nullifies the effect of the voice command enforcer.

Finally Peace gets to the planet he wants to, Aspatria. There he uses his four hours leave to escape from the Legion and start to investigate his past, and get back his memories.

This is more of a talky novel than other of Bob Shaw’s work in that there is a lot more dialogue in this novel than normally in a novel by Bob Shaw. It’s very funny in places and moderately funny in other places. There are a few running jokes which crop up throughout the book and these are well used by Shaw: not overused as can happen. A lot of the book is snappy and a lot of the dialogue rolls on, taking the reader further into the story and letting us get closer to Warren and the other characters – even the minor ones. It is a very enjoyable book by Bob Shaw, although its core isn’t as high concept as some of his other work.

* The figure thirty can read as taken to be forty, or even fifty, according to the contract.

Books Books Books

I’m surrounded by books at the moment. I've got a Sturgeon book sitting on my ‘to be read’ pile and right underneath that there is a Harlan Ellison short story collection. I'm working my way (backwards!) through the last omnibus of Doc Savage adventures. I started with the two ‘afterwards’ and then read Doc's final adventure, Up From The Earth's Centre.

And to be honest I was disappointed. It didn't read like a Doc novel, and Doc behaved a lot differently than in other novels. The other two novels I read in the omnibus are the same; Doc is out of character. And to be frank they are very short, a lot closer to novellas or novelettes than novels, with a couple of them coming in under one hundred pages. The afterword by Will Murray mentions the last editor of Doc Savage magazine and how a lot of changes were asked for and implemented. They were changes too far in my opinion. However it seems that it wasn't sales that saw off Doc in the end but the Publisher’s decision to get out of pulp magazines; sales of Doc Savage (Science detective) were still quite good.

I bought Foster’s Scottish Oddities as an impulse purchase on Amazon after reading extracts in a daily newspaper during the week. There are some hilarious facts in it and some great stories, one that had me rolling about was the one about someone reporting to the police the fact that there was a live shark thrashing about in a Glasgow street. Only in Glasgow. It’s a good book to dip in and out of and also for reading chunks at a time as it is divided into relevant sections.

Also I got a pretty good three for two at Waterstone’s; two short story collections and a novel with a free book attached. It's very rare for short story collections to be seen in book shops outside the SF section. So I snapped them up. So, four for two actually, and they were all at the cheap price of £6.99 - a price which is getting a bit scarce in bookshops.

Firefox 2

Looks like I might have to forego using Firefox 2 and start using the bloated and fault ridden version 3. There have been a few sites lately that have had errors of presentation with Firefox 2 when I visited them (and it took me a couple of attempts to log into Facebook) but have been ok with Internet Explorer when I tested the sites. The main problem is that I use a U3 USB stick rather than run Browsers from my computer; and Firefox 3 isn't available for U3 at the moment, only as a portable app. Which is something entirely different.

I've downloaded a couple of different portable browsers to play around with, and see if any of them are worthy of replacing Firefox.  The only thing is that I’m settled with Firefox; I’m comfortable with it, like it and there are a lot of settings stored such as passwords to sites and forums. I know a browser is basically a browser but they are not all the same.

The Sturgeon complete short stories Volume 12 has turned up and it looks like I haven't read most of the stories in that volume. They were mostly first printed in ‘Sturgeon is Alive and Well’ which is a book I don’t have in my collection. Don’t know why I never bothered to buy a copy. There's also an unpublished story in this collection which I made a bee line for.

The Doc Savage book has arrived too, and I'm looking forward to reading his last ever adventure. I'm in two minds about which one to tackle first as the second last one, Return From Cormoral, sounds very interesting too.

While I’m Waiting

While waiting for a couple of books to arrive I decided to look through my pile of ‘to be read’ books for something to engage my time. I’m waiting on Volume twelve of Theodore Sturgeon’s complete short stories, a collection of shorts from Harlan Ellison and the last omnibus of Doc Savage (winging its way from America with free postage so that’ll take forever) with his final adventure, Up From The Earth’s Centre. I didn’t find anything I wanted to read, or anything that captured my interest. Everything seemed to be four hundred pages or above. I’m growing averse to big thick books; they don’t entice me at all. A novel of a couple of hundred pages is just fine for me at the moment.


A couple of days later while sorting out some books that could go onto the bookmooch list I came across a boxed set of James Herbert novels. I remember buying it for £9.99; five books so that works out at a couple of pounds each. There was only one or two that I had read before.

I used to read a lot of James Herbert; I either bought his books new, second hand or borrowed from the library. He’s a good solid writer that has produced a quality laden body of work over the years. I briefly checked through them before deciding on ‘The Haunted’ (Cheers Larry) and I’m now about a third of the way through it – mainly due to the short chapters he has with this book. After reading one I look at the page count of the next chapter and think, ‘yeah, I can read one more.’


There may be a little nostalgia about choosing this book and James Herbert as, even though his books are horror novels, I know it’s not likely I’ll come across a lot of swearing, sex and mindless violence. It’ll be just a good story well told. Not that I’ve got anything against swearing sex and mindless violence; that can be a good night out. Sometimes they can be out of place in fiction, sometimes they fit perfectly and sometimes they are required. But it’s good to read something that is story and character based, well paced and from a master writer.

Killer Planet, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04510-8

A little confession here: I bought a second hand copy of Killer Planet in hardback sometime in the early nineties but I never got round to reading it. When bought the book was put at the bottom of my reading pile, and it sort of stayed there. As books moved from room to room when space was needed here and there I never actually got round to reading it.

When I started completing my collection of Bob Shaw Gollancz hardbacks again (I briefly tried years ago with little success) the book Killer Planet was brought to my attention again as I looked through the books to see what was still to get and I put Killer Planet further up my list of books to read. But, again, it never made it to the front row – even though I found time to skim trough his other books while creating these reviews and on a couple of occasions completely re read some of Shaw’s books.

So. I set aside some time and decided to concentrate on this book. Unique among Shaw books in that it is for a specific audience. Killer Planet is a Young adult novel from Bob Shaw and so is a very slim book, coming in at just over one hundred pages.

Published in 1989 the brief prologue sets us up for many dangers, telling us that after mankind learnt to cross the distance between stars with the Gemmell drive he came across Mother Nature at her fiercest, with new dangers everywhere he turned.

The most dangerous of these was Verdia, nick named the Killer Planet. Many people had gone to the planet never to return, including the brother of Jan Hazard. Hazard’s father, Donn, had spent the last few years working toward sending an expedition to the planet to rescue his son. A mission he intended to do alone. Jan though has other ideas; he knows his father would not be up to the job and is adamant that he will take his father’s place, go to Verdia and rescue his brother.

Unfortunately Donn Hazard has neglected to pay the bills during his quest to build a spaceship to go to Verdia and with the most inappropriate timing bailiffs turn up the day before the launch to confiscate all of Donn’s possessions to pay off his debts. Jan has no other option. The flight must go ahead; the rescue attempt must be made. And so Jan steals the ship and the rescue attempt is still on.

He makes it to the system where the Killer Planet is and is surprised to discover someone else on board. Petra is the love interest of the story, introduced in Chapter one as a friend. Jan is initially against her presence but as luck would have it Petra manages to take control of the ship when Jan is knocked semi unconscious at the final take off toward the planet.

The ship struggles through the cloudy atmosphere of the planet, nearly destroying the vessel – which is made out of hard plastics rather than metal due to the nature of Verdia, which attacks metal. They land on the planet and straight away are caught up in the weird and dangerous life forms on the planet as they try to investigate an old ruined city.

But it is when they discover the shattered and seared ships and equipment that the real surprise of the Killer Planet shows itself.

This is pretty much an action adventure from Bob Shaw, as mentioned geared toward the younger reader. There is a lot of vivid descriptive writing from Shaw and the characters are the straight forward no nonsense hardy type. Also, being designed for the younger reader, the book isn’t very long, in fact it is too short.
It took me a little while to get into the swing of the book, and Shaw only gave us minor glimpses of characterisation to help identify with each character in the book. The emotional attachment of going to the Killer Planet to rescue their sibling gave a good enough motive, and the action of the escape from earth forces was well written, well paced and enthralling, however the characterisation lacked a little in my opinion.
Overall it was an enjoyable read, really only picking up in pace and excitement when the protagonists actually reach the Killer planet around Chapter Five, and Shaw is very inventive in getting his heroes out of the scrapes they find themselves in on the planet. A mixture of daring do and brains keeps the two – Jan and Petra – alive to fight again. The whole story is neatly tied up with a happy outcome for all concerned following an adventurous and thrilling dénouement. This novel would make a good introduction to Bob Shaw, particularly for the target audience of the young adult.

Shaw Mooch

I joined bookmooch recently, mainly to get rid of some paperbacks that have been lying around and have no chance of ever being read. But I decided also to add the SF Book club editions of the Bob Shaw novels I own.  A couple I bought ages ago and a couple I bought by mistake recently – when they were advertised as the Gollancz editions. For the ones I bought years ago I now have the Gollancz editions so they are surplus.

I’ve nothing against the SF Book club – if it still exists – I just don’t personally like them. They don’t look good and their jackets are dull in my opinion.

I did belong to book clubs years and years ago but they never issued their own editions, just clipped editions from the original publishers.

So, if you’re in the market for free books have a look at bookmooch.

First of April

First of April and all that. Didn't get caught out by any April fools this year. Not that I’ve noticed much. Spotted a couple online but that’s it. Since Climategate I'm a lot more suspicious of anything I read and take less and less on trust - having said that someone emailed me and said they had millions of pounds waiting to be transferred to my account ...

Bought my name again; the dot com, the dot co dot uk seems to be still suspended, even though it ran out at the beginning of the year.

So, another blog. I've put WordPress in a folder on my main site and when the dot com is up and running I'll just get it redirected to the new folder. (Hopefully.)

Wordpress is great. I had the blog up and running after about ten minutes. The only problem with it is that you can't change the user name, and the default user for everyone is called admin. Ergo I have to make sure I'm typing the correct password into the correct admin for the blog. There are now three at the same dot com. I'm trying a new theme there and have made a few test posts with pictures. A couple of glitches but things are alright now. Just have to get pictures to fit into the picture frame in the theme; right now they are being stretched a little.

I'll have to tinker with the blog a little before it'll be perfect but it's looking good. Widgets and plugins have been installed and it's on the latest version of WordPress from the get go.

Snow??!!

More snow! Go out to the car today to go to work and there is snow lying on the top of the hills. Everything else had turned to rain and it's probably too warm for that snow to lie too long but the clocks have just went forward; we are now in summer time. There should be no snow.

Google Analytics seems to be working now on two of my sites. I pasted the code given to me by Google into all the sites but a couple don't recognise it. Now I can see pretty graphs showing me who is visiting and from where. Mostly UK, some form North America and some the far east - that'll be the spammers. Germany is coming up as a country with a lot of visits too. Don't know why that would be.


I need to get a few more Bob Shaw blogs up and posted on the Bosh blog; I've only made two posts there this month. Speaking of Bob I missed out on a cheap copy of his Interzone special on eBay. Never mind, perhaps next time.

Rainy Day In March

As per, triple whammy with road tax, first community charge payment and electric bill. I delayed road tax till last possible moment in the hope that the payment will be on next month's credit card. I'll find out whether I was successful or not when the bill comes in. Phone bill also came in and there was a one off charge which, after I called and complained, was removed from my bill with apologies. It just shows you what chancers companies are nowadays.

Bought some DOS software on eBay; £20 and half of that was postage. I only got it because it came with a pack of printed manuals. Online help is quick and nice but sometimes you want to sit and read a book not stare at pixels. I've got DosBox on my USB drive, so if I can find or borrow a USB floppy I can install the software on the U3 USB.

1.5GB of broadband used this month, with over one week when I wasn't even online. Must be the lowest usage month since I got broadband. I did look at some of the broadband providers, as I was thinking of switching, but if I'm not using my allocated amount. ... Sky seemed good, but they have set up fees for two out of the three packages they offer, and set up fees to me are deal killers.

Finally finished Son of Retro Pulp. I left Harlan to last and he didn't disappoint. There were some really good stories in the collection, particularly Joe R. Lansdale's 'The Crawling Sky', and there were a wide variety of pulp genres presented, from hard boiled detective to weird. I might try and hunt down the first book. That being said there were a few errors not spotted by the proof readers, page 101 (I think that's the page) having a few of its own, with one or two dotted around in a couple of other stories. These didn't distract from the reading of the stories but were noticeable.

Street Map

Eek! I've just found out that ninety five percent of the UK is on Google Street View! So I checked my town, and yes, my house is there. Luckily the grass was cut. Don't know when it was that Google streeted the place but I'd guess the pictures were taken less than a year ago. The time is around mid morning I think.  Hardly any cars parked in the streets, not many people going about. Although, having said that it appears to have been taken over a series of days. Some of the pictures show sunny skies some a little cloudier. I noticed a few chavs as I viewed the rest of the town and the surrounding area. I’m still undecided if Google Street View is a good thing or a bad thing.

Pruning and stuff

I did a serious pruning of my bookmarks (backing up beforehand of course) and it went from over 2MB as an export down to 731 K for an export. Firefox now loads a little quicker (or is that just me?). I just took off all the sites I visit rarely, or haven't visited for a long time. It's amazing how much there were. Of course, I have a habit of bookmarking sites often and on whim, so they do tend to build up.

I use Google Reader so any site that I'm going to regularly means that I can visit it through that; it doesn't do just blogs. I've added other sites to the list on Google Reader, so it's becoming a default one stop shop. Not that I've been online much lately. I've access to broadband usage through my Madasafish account and there are a lot of days where it says 0 K.

Driving back into my home town at the weekend I noticed there was still some snow on hill tops. Not much but it was noticeable, and it hasn't gone during the week either. So we’re well into March and still some snow lying.

I bought a couple of Quick Reads recently, one of them turned out to be pretty naff even though it was from a top name author; I'll leave the other one till later. I think they’re a great idea. About a hundred pages, £1.99. Great for a short burst of reading; provided you can get decent enough stories. I'm halfway through a Doc Savage at the moment and I've just one story left in Son of Retro Pulp Tales. Plus the new issue of Interzone has arrived. Gadzooks! subscription up after next issue.

When I was in town at the weekend situations conspired to give me a free lottery ticket. I found out when I got home and was putting the receipt into my accounts package.  Yes, I'm anal like that. It used to be that there was no money left at the end of the month and I was asking Where has it all gone? I got Sage Instant from eBay for about £40 a couple of years ago and keep track of all my finances now. Bank accounts, Credit Cards, ISAs, cash in hand. There's still no money left at the end of the month but I know where it all went. I'd like to say that the free ticket made me a millionaire but it didn't. Only two numbers came up on it. Not even a tenner.

The Two Timers, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 575-0037-3

The Two Timers is one of Bob Shaw’s earlier novels, dating from 1968, and like his first few early novels published in America before being published in the UK. Indeed The Two Timers, actually his third novel, was the first of Shaw’s novels to be published in the UK, by Gollancz in 1969.

The basic plot of the novel is standard SF fare, but Shaw lifts this novel up with his characterisation and the emotional depth that he puts into the main characters. Conflict and consequences of choice are prevalent throughout the book, and indeed are the driving force of this novel.

I remember vaguely Roger Moore starred in a film with a comparable plot, released around the same time – give or take a couple of years either side. I can’t even remember the name of the film let alone when it was released. I do remember it had that late sixties early seventies feel to it and was made by Moore before he became Bond.

The novel The Two Timers starts with John Breton receiving a telephone call from someone who says Breton has been living with the other’s wife for the past nine years and he’s coming round to the house to reclaim her. Breton’s first thought is that it is a practical joke. Breton returns to his wife and house guests, who are indulging in automatic writing, the result of which is a poem that puts Breton on edge. Breton remembers the night he almost lost his wife and a mystery is introduced when it is revealed she was saved by a mystery man who disappeared. After escorting their dinner guests to their car Breton stays at the doorway to smoke a cigarette in the cool evening air, and then is surprised by the appearance of the man who called him earlier, still on a mission to get back his wife.

The second chapter takes up from that moment and is told from the perspective of the other Breton, Jack Breton. Jack proves who he is with the recounting of an early personal memory. Jack Breton tells a tale of a night when his wife was attacked; only with his tale his wife dies and is not saved by a stranger. He blames himself; so much so that he ends up in hospital. Breton continues to replay the incident in his head, and he slowly begins to think that he can travel in time.

Months pass and the idea that he can find a way to travel through time seeps into him and consumes him. Then he does go back in time and saves his wife. But on returning to his present he finds that nothing has changed, he remembers her funeral, she is not at the family home; greeting him with open arms and a smile. And so his quest to regain his wife begins again.

The appearance of Jack Breton into the lives of John and Kate Breton is a very neat, incredibly inventive twist in the eternal love triangle. The situation becomes which version of Breton will win the woman?

The novel develops further with a new twist in the story in that there appears more and more evidence for mind to mind contact, telepathy: the poem from the first chapter proves to be something that the new arrival, Jack Breton, had written in his despair, and tests in laboratories showed success for some people up to a level of one hundred per cent in psychic tests. Add to this the fact that the original police officer who investigated the case still has suspicions about Breton and the tensions in the story ratchet up a notch.

I read the novel in a couple of sittings way back in the late eighties, having bought a second hand edition of the SF book club printing of The Two Timers. I recently purchased a Gollancz hardback copy for quite a bit of cash, although I’ve still to get a paperback copy of the book. When I first read this novel it was a fun, enthralling read.

Shaw grabs you right at the start and drags you through a story of alternative timelines, alternative universes and personal turmoil. It’s a novel that is more emotive and dealing with deeply personal issues than some of his works and is all the better for it. Of course, it can’t be any less personal seeing as the protagonist is facing an antagonist who claims to be him. Even though it’s one of his earlier novels and not as well developed as some of his later and more mature work – which only comes from time – it is a well constructed, well plotted and very well executed work.

I found The Two Timers a satisfying read when I first read it and a very good and competent piece of writing when I went through it again to brush up on it before starting this review. In the later chapters of the book there are a lot of characters introduced who have little to do with the main plot, and although they may have been introduced to show the effects of the time travel, it does deter a little from what is a powerful and tantalizing story that is well told by Bob Shaw.

The Ides of March

First blog of March. I hate March. The 'Community Charge' returns, Road Tax is due in March, the winter bills come in during March. Not a happy bunny month.

I signed into one of my domain names using the Control Panel today; first time I've done that for months and months - probably over a year. Since I started using blogs and then Windows Live there was no need to sign into the actual domain name itself. There are about seventy emails, mainly notifying me of failure to deliver. I contacted Compila about this before and they said there was nothing that can be done about it. Apparently some spammer sends out spam and the return address is my domain. I'm not the only one this happens to.

I came across a blog or site a couple of years ago from someone who was getting the same done to them. They also said that there was nothing that could be done.

The good thing is that the emails are from last year, which means the email box is full and any new ones that come in get bounced automatically due to the mail box being full to the brim. I blogged about that and the paradox it may create last year I think.

As some sites have said they will no longer support Firefox Version Two I downloaded and installed the portable version of Firefox V3 on my USB stick. It's slick, slow and shyte. It stopped responding about half a dozen times within a few days. Version Two never gave me any noticeable trouble in the past two or three years. I think there were only about a handful of crashes in that whole time. Not sure how many were attributable to Firefox and how many to other causes but overall Version Two was very stable.

I'm guessing here but I think Version Three is writing temporary data to the USB drive; which is slower than an ordinary drive to begin with. Version Three is the PortableApp version, while Version Two is the U3 edition.

It was easy enough to transfer all settings and bookmarks; I just copied them from the folder in Version Two and pasted them into the same folder in Version Three. Launch Firefox 3 and voila, all bookmarks and all password settings right there. Since I installed it the trouble has been ongoing; slow response from the program, crashes, hassle. I don't care which sites stop supporting Version Two of Firefox I'm going to keep on using it.

The Dry Patch

Two reasons for the post title. A) I’ve nothing to blog about at the moment and B) this link at the blog Big Beat From Badsville is responsible (I believe inspiration is the polite term) for what is below.

The Dry Patch – A Great Detective Story

It was with trepidation and sadness that I picked up my bags and made for the door. My friend the Great Detective had not been working on any cases for months. ‘You need a break my dear friend,’ he told me ‘writing up all my adventures must take it out of you and since there is a lull this is the best time for you to rest.’

‘No no I'm fine,’ I insisted, but he had already made the booking.

‘A small two horse town, called Dunnum,' he informed me. 'You shall enjoy your stay at the Dunnum Inn I can assure you. I've booked you into the inn for the whole weekend. On Monday I shall visit and solve the crime.’

‘Visit?’ I queried ‘Crime?’ It beggared belief. My friend the Great Detective was so good he could smell a murder a mile off!

‘Best be off with you or you'll miss your train,’ he commanded. ‘If you can't reach Dunnam by nightfall I'm sure someone in the nearby town of Angam will put you up.’

This lifted my spirits and so I set off to the Dunnum Inn in a cheery mood.

Songs and Parodies

Oops, just like that spent seven quid on 7digital. Been a few months since I've bought anything from there. Went over via the weekly email to see if the free tracks were worth downloading (a couple were) and did some searches for various artists as per norm. A few of my favourites are starting to crop up more and more. Ended up getting some Uli Roth. And seeing as we were on German bands I then searched for Ashra and their 1979 album Correlations came up. I love that album. I still have the vinyl copy and if I had a record player I'd play it (what's a record player granddad?). Sadly the tracks were expensively priced so I only bought my most favourite songs; Bamboo Sands, Morgana Da Capo and the utterly amazing Phantasus.

I'm removing thebookseller.com from my bookmarks. I don't know what they've done since the site was redesigned a few months ago but for me it is totally unusable. After it has loaded it takes a minute and a half downloading stuff from various farms at static.flickr.com, during which time the site is slow and unresponsive. And this is on a broadband connection. I stopped visiting temporarily when the video ads on the front page played automatically and chewed up bandwidth but that was resolved when I went back later; however the slowness due to fetching stuff from flickr.com just makes the site a waste of time.

Talking of waste of time, I wasted some time this week watching Hitler parodies on YouTube. Some of them can be hilarious. If you don’t know them they are reposting of one scene from the movie Downfall with the original German dialogue but made up sub titles in English (and other languages; I believe the first one was in Spanish) on various topics. Hitler goes mental at getting banned from X-box, World of Warcraft, getting scammed by 419ers, football results, the Hitler parodies themselves.  As I said, some of them are hilarious, others good and there’s a fair few duff ones too.

I’ll have to see about upgrading Firefox as YouTube is another site not supporting version two anymore. I get a message saying support for that version will be stopping soon every time I visit YouTube.

Boot Fuh'n Time Te

That's not my Sunday accent. That's my Fife accent. We Fifers are amongst the fastest speaking in Scotland and it's sometimes because of that instead of our accent that people don't understand what we're saying. That and we usually talk crap :)

The time that it is about is the arrival of Son of Retro Pulp Tales (Packed by Theresa!). I ordered this last September and I'm pretty sure it was originally supposed to come out August 2009. I received copy number 193 of the limited edition. So I have some pulpish adventures to look forward to, courtesy of Harlan Ellison, William F Nolan, Joe R Lansdale and others. I think everything else will be put aside until I've gone through this tome.

(Son of Retro cover)           

                                     

  

   (First page of signatures)

Today I also received a couple of other books, one of which is The Third Pan Book of Horror Stories. I ordered this from Abe Books because it was supposed to contain a story by Bob Shaw, A Real Downer. The book arrives and there is no Shaw story in it. Going back to Abe books it's The Pan Book of Horror *Dark voices* 3. Bugger. No doubt a re-launch of the series. The seller selling the book with the Shaw story was (still is) selling four books and I only wanted the one so I went to another seller later on in the search who was only selling the one edition. Still some short stories to read later on.

One thing that pisses me off is that the three books that arrived were too large to put through the letter box so I had to go and collect them from the Post Office. I know I can have them re delivered but it doesn't seem worth it. The main Post Office where they go back to is only a five/ten minute drive. All three books were packaged so they wouldn't go through the letter box. Fine for the Pulp Collection; it came from America and was securely packed in a box for its transatlantic journey. The other two had no excuse as they were both small paperbacks. But they were packaged in flat packed envelopes - which were bloody difficult to cut into for fear of cutting into the books - that were just a waste of packaging.

Medusa's Children, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 575-02249-3

To be honest I had trouble writing this as Medusa’s Children, although a fine novel, was one that I could never really commit to one hundred percent. I’ve been working on this piece for a couple of months and progress has been slow. When I first started reading the book there was the delight of the new, reading a new work from a favourite author, and of being led through the story for the first time. It was an enjoyable journey first time around but didn’t leave as much of an impression as some of Bob Shaw’s other works.

I didn’t really warm to Medusa’s Children too much when I first read it, in paperback, years and years ago. The book itself, physically, was pretty tightly bound, and there were some cracks after reading as I had to pull the pages more to make get them more open. The same thing happened to my paperback copy of Other Days Other Eyes; perhaps too much glue in the binding and the books themselves weren’t as pliable as most other paperbacks. Also I didn’t feel that the subject matter was as exciting as that of other books written by Bob Shaw.

The paperback was brand new when I bought it, bright and shining even though the paperback itself was printed in 1978. It was bought from the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh in the middle eighties (oops, we are in another century now so I will have to qualify that as the mid 1980s) just when I was just getting into Bob Shaw. 

As I mentioned it was brand new bright and shiny when bought but when I picked it out to go through it again for the purposes of this piece it had acquired that old book smell. Quite recently I purchased a Gollancz hardback edition of the novel which was signed by Bob Shaw.

The book is set in the seas and not in outer space or dealing with other dimensions. It felt a little closer to fantasy than science fiction to me and I’m afraid I wasn’t one hundred per cent captured by the premise when I read it first. Very little of the book sticks in my memory and I had to re read it to refresh myself on the contents of the book before starting this post.

Straight away Shaw drags us into a strange world so much different from our own. As I said this novel is set underwater and we are first introduced to Myrah. She awakes from sleep, sure that there is something wrong; that the children she is protecting, watching over, are in danger. The danger proves nonexistent and Shaw then starts to develop the characters and situation, bringing us information and showing us the underwater society.

Hal Tarrant is ex air force and relatively new to Cawley Island farm. He has an encounter with seemingly intelligent squid which affects him quite a bit as he is a little reluctant to admit to himself the squid are working together to steal and eat the algae that he farms. He had noted a loss, as unsure how it was being stolen but was a little unwilling to accept it was squid, even as he was seeing it.

In Myrah’s world the humans – The Clan – are diminishing in numbers and she can see little future for them. This is confirmed at a Council meeting as it is said The Home is in danger and a call is made for volunteers to ‘follow the new current as far into the darkness as it will take them.’

Interesting to note that in this time of Climate Change and the controversy surrounding it Shaw mentions the Bergmann Hypothesis. I’ll have to do some checking to see if it’s something Shaw made up or a scientific proposal he used. (Wehey, There is a Bergmann’s Rule but I’m not sure if it’s the same Bergmann. I found a PDF online called ‘Climate change, body size evolution, and Cope’s Rule in deep-sea ostracodes’, authored – I kid you not – by Gene Hunt.) ‘Every now and then’ it is explained in Shaw’s book, ‘we get an ice age, and sometimes the pendulum swings the other way and we get a freakish warm period.’ This is how Shaw sums up the Bergmann Hypothesis. The copyright on the book is 1977, long before Climate science entered the public consciousness.

Myrah is among the group that sets out to explore the possibility of a new home for the Clan. They are attacked by Horra, squid that can kill humans quickly and effectively, but to her surprise they are not killed, but taken to the home of Ka, the strange being the Clan fear

After coming face to face, mind to mind, with Ka Myrah and the group reach the surface and from then on her life and the life of Hal become more intertwined. The novel touches on the hive mind, in a different way as done by others; for example Theodore Sturgeon in More Than Human.

The book is interesting and worth a read but I didn’t find it as engrossing or captivating as other Shaw novels, or even his short stories. The characters are not as memorable as some of Shaw’s other creations, and aren’t as well drawn or in depth. Having said that I think it is well plotted and rolls along at a reasonable pace, with revelations at appropriate places and logical enough to keep the reader on track. I did feel it was closer to a fantasy novel than straight forward science fiction and I do stick to that. It’s not one of Shaw’s best in my opinion but worth the time if you’re inclined to explore its’ world.

Two Bob

I've checked and double checked - and will continue to check – but it looks like I've only two more Gollancz hard back editions of Bob Shaw's work to get. These are 1 Million Tomorrows and Palace of Eternity. Then I'll have a full set of Shaw works in Gollancz hardbacks. With concentrating on getting the hardbacks and looking out for the best prices this has sort of crept up on me. Last year it was a monumental task I had to carry out, now it's just a bit of tidying up.

Although, the ones still to get are tricky; they are both early novels from the late sixties and early seventies and they don't come cheap or pop up in availability a lot.

It's taken at least a year (and a fair amount of money) to complete my collection but even when I do have all the books in Gollancz hardback I've still got a lot of Shaw to find. Shaw had four short story collections but he published a lot more short stories. Luckily I have a bibliography which can help me identify the magazines and track them down.

Before the internet it was hard to track down Bob Shaw's work, you'd wander round J R Hartley like asking if they have it: now it's just a matter of typing in his name in search engines and book sites.

I wasn't too much into magazines when reading SF, it was always books. I suppose mainly because I was either buying them or borrowing them from the library. I subscribe to Interzone now but SF magazines have never been a big purchase.

Palace of Eternity is a gripping story, space opera like with very vivid aliens, and it's a very memorable novel, dedicated to E A Van Vogt.

More Doc Mags

The other two Doc Savage magazines have turned up and these are in much better condition. The first is Dagger In The Sky. I've not read that; and flipping through the magazine there's an editorial where they mention the next issue's feature: The Other World. By coincidence I've just finished reading the paperback edition of that. There's only the one other story in this issue, the novelette Formula for Death by George L Eaton. Overall both magazines seem fairly robust. In comparison to the first one I bought: I've just started reading the story, The Motion Menace, and the magazine starts to fall apart. Odd that it deals with aircraft at the start of the novel and it's mentioned that crashed flights were blamed by the early airline industry on sabotage and terrorists by the PR departments of airlines. Damn. Terrorists mentioned in 1938. The war on terror has been going on longer than we thought.

The second magazine received, the Jan 1941 issue is the same: one novel and one supporting story, Caldron of Confucius (sic, although the actual story is spelt correctly) by Joseph H Hernandes. The Doc story is The Devil's Playground. I have read that but I gave away/sold the book ages ago. I remember it was one of the double novels I bought in Edinburgh way back in the eighties.

I also like the drawings in the magazines, it shows Doc as a man and not some sort of superhero in ripped clothing like the paperbacks do. Also, among the ads scattered through the magazine, something I didn’t know: there were Doc Savage comics issued at the same time. This issue (Jan 1941) advertises the Frozen Terror plus a full colour story about Alex the Sun-Man.

First Doc Mag

The first Doc Savage Magazine has arrived. It's very fragile, not in the best of conditions, some sticky pages, some torn. The main feature is The Motion menace, and I've not read it. There's also Deap-Sea danger by Alan Hathway, Snake Bite by Harold A Davis, Enemy on Wheels by Laurance Donovan and Murder in his heart by Norman A Daniels. I'm not sure if any of those are pseudonyms of Lester Dent or not. There's a couple of other features also. By the looks of things the person I bought it from paid more than me for it as it came sealed in a bag with a price tag more than what I paid on eBay. Or perhaps that's what a previous owner paid.

Flipping through the magazine I noted something odd (apart from the fact what a weird world the 1930s were, Life on Mars indeed) when I came across a strange report. Page 112 Quote: Not long ago a strange sight was seen over New York City's second highest building, the Chrysler Building...Atop this great structure is a steel spire, and one cold, sharp morning an extension that looked like a streak of black light appeared to rise high into the heavens above this spire. ... Some observers believe that the strange beam of black light was a form of mirage....But a more logical explanation seems to be that it was caused by St Elmo's fire.

True reporting (there were supposed to be photographs) or a bit of play acting by the editors for the fans of Doc? I hope to get more time later to go through the magazine. And of course I'm expecting a couple more which should be in better condition.

More Doc Savage

Still waiting on the arrival of my first Doc Savage Magazine, but in the meantime I’ve bought a couple more, one really cheap. I’ve definitely read one of them before, but it was one of the books I gave away. So, two new Doc stories to read at most. And there’s the additional material in the magazines, other stories and features.

One of the magazines doesn’t look in great condition going by the photo on eBay but the other two are supposed to be in very good condition. I should give eBay a bit of a rest as I’ve spent a little too much this month. Luckily some of it will go on next month’s credit card bill.  But I couldn’t say no to a rare Bob Shaw book going at a reasonable price, then it just rolled from there with offers of books and magazines too good to turn down. I didn’t with them all, but – funnily enough – I lost the cheap ones and won the more expensive ones.

Book is bit on the expensive side

While browsing on eBay I came across a very expensive book.

There was no explanation of why this book, published in 2000, should cost so much: you could definitely buy a house for that amount where I live – whether you’d want to live in it in this area is a different matter:) There's not much information on it online either (not that I looked hard). Only that it's slightly cheaper on Amazon.

The site of the author of this tome doesn't give any indications why two book sellers should value it at six figures bar a penny for one and two pence for the other. Oh, plus £2.75 shipping.

Two Timers

I got the one I wanted most out of all the items I'm bidding on eBay this week. Bob Shaw's The Two Timers in the Gollancz hardback edition. £35 with free postage (postage can sometimes add up to as much as twelve pounds to the price; particularly if I'm buying from America). This is pretty good considering the prices elsewhere start at around about £50 plus postage for the cheapest copies available on the web. And it's a very uncommon book to find on the web, particularly as it's a very old novel of Shaw's. It's said to be in good to very good condition but I'll see what it's like when it arrives, which hopefully won’t take too long seeing as the seller is in the UK. I have an SF Book club hardback edition which I read years ago and found it to be a very engrossing book.

More Doc Savage

After getting my first honest to goodness pulp magazine by purchasing a copy of Weird Tales recently I’ve now bought my very first original Doc Savage pulp magazine. I won the 1938 issue with ‘Motion Menace’ as the main feature on eBay. The condition, like the Weird Tales one, is not great, and the price is reflected in that fact. I got it for £15 and was the only bidder.  I’m not sure if I’ve read Motion Menace. I bought several of the double novel editions issued in the eighties and gave most of them away (can’t remember which but I either sold them to a book dealer or donated them to my local library ; I suspect the former as I only donated to my local library a few times but sold books on a lot of times).

I've a few more items ending over the next few days and hope to win those too, even though it'll cost me a lot of money. Although I've got about twenty or so of the Doc Savage novels – mainly the ones issued in the sixties picked up second hand – I’m looking forward to getting my first Doc Savage magazine. Oddly enough I'm buying the magazine from someone in the UK. There are a fair few of the magazines available from US sellers on eBay but they're asking fifty dollars and above; quite a few of them at one to two hundred dollars. Don't know what the exact exchange rate for dollars and pounds is at the moment, but I'm saving by buying from the UK as I'm getting it post free – although it was probably built into the bidding price – and the postage from sellers in the US can sometimes cause me to think twice about bidding on things.

I also received another Doc novel, Other World, in the post today, and seeing as I’ve finished No Mean City I’ll probably start reading that Doc novel – although I’ve got the newest issue of Interzone in; nothing in that issue has piqued my interest yet.

SF Defection

I've made a (temporary) move away from SF this week. I follow some crime related blogs and No Mean City was mentioned in one of them. I'd heard of this novel before, it kept cropping up here and there. And of course I can't think of No Mean City without hearing Maggie Bell singing the theme from Taggart.

So on impulse I bought it from Amazon with free shipping and it has arrived. I'm going through it at a rate of knots. It's a weird book. Set in the twenties in Glasgow it supposedly deals with the life of Razor King Johnny Stark. But there is very little narrative structure. Characters come and go; pages get devoted to people and then they're off. It's the product of a baker and a journalist, (Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long) brought together no doubt by the publisher way back in the thirties. The publisher says it’s copyrighted but I think it’s one of those orphan works, where the owner can’t be contacted as there are no dates on the copyright page. It was first published in 1935.

It is oddly compelling though and there is strength to the writing that comes through even across the decades. Even through the matter of fact way things are explained (with explanations in English in brackets for those that don't understand certain words) and the lack of a serious plot, the character of those people living their lives in the twenties shines out. The simple thing is that a lot of it rings true, and the book is all the more powerful for that. (Full disclosure: although I make fun of the Weegies as often as possible I do have to admit that I am half Weegie myself, my mother coming from Glasgow, and I did visit her home town a few times when I was young.)

Another link to this book is that I am a fan of Ronnie Montrose. He had a group in the early eighties who released three albums, imaginatively entitled Gamma 1, Gamma 2 and Gamma 3 (there was the obligatory reunion which resulted in Gamma 4). I actually saw them in concert at the Edinburgh Playhouse when they supported Foreigner. Good stuff. Anyway, on their first album, released in 1979, is the song Razor King, all about Johnny Stark. They played that live in Edinburgh, Davey Pattison, the singer from Glasgow, calling it a 'Scottish Folk song'.

I found myself struggling to keep up with the blogs I was following on Google reader and stopped following about ten or so. I wanted to get the number under 40 but failed by a couple. Having said that I sign on over the last couple of days and instead of the fifty or sixty blog posts I have to read there are now less than a dozen. Those ones I now actually read rather than skimming through. Maybe subconsciously I was pruning the ones that posted the most.

Urlg. If I win all the things I'm bidding on at eBay I'll have to fork out over sixty quid. Thankfully the ending times are spread over a week. I hope I win them all, I don't want to be outbid for any of them; some of the things I'm getting are very cheap.