jpurdie

Getting Grumpy?

2012-01-19T11:25:00.001Z

Been a bit lax in posts lately, partly because I had little to write about but mainly because I've been a bit lazy blog wise, deferring and deferring doing some posts.

I’ve also been wondering if I’m turning into a grumpy old man. I've bought a lot of books lately and have been disappointed and pissed off with most of them.

I've bought a fair amount of nonfiction recently, which is quite rare as I generally think twice and then think for a third time before buying nonfiction books, in the main because they are more expensive than fiction, and I feel have a reduced re read factor (fiction authors must be bitches; having a higher cover price the nonfiction crew would be getting higher royalties). And I've found Penguin books in particular to be horrendously expensive. Doubly so in that they also produce a lot of public domain material where no royalties are paid and yet those books are still expensive.

I picked up How To Destroy The Universe and dipped in and out of it and it is pure mince. For a start the author (Paul Parsons) accepts Man Made Global Warming - particularly ironic as another chapter is How To Predict the Weather where he concludes we can't because the system is so complex; but one tiny trace gas from us can overrule this complex system and cause global warming - the chapters bear little resemblance to the chapter headings and are short, both in length and content.

I was very intrigued by Empire State by Adam Christopher, and picked it up a few times in some shops before buying it from WH Smith. Unfortunately I couldn't get past Chapter Two as in the first chapter the point of view kept appearing to flip back and forward between Rex and Jerome which made it feel confusing. Chapter Three also started on Rex and I'm thinking 'where's this Red Bradley that's talked about on the blurb on the back?' Does this author know nothing? Chapter three and the main character hasn't been introduced yet? How did he get this published?

Year's Best SF 16 was snaffled from Waterstone's and I was looking forward to some good short stories. It was priced at £6.99 and was an American import. Unfortunately I was disappointed as it seems the art of short story writing has been lost. Meandering pish is the phrase that springs to mind most. Very few stories hooked me from the beginning, developed the story or idea and finished with a punch. David Langford's story started off well and developed quite nicely but there was no payoff, and the ending was a bit of a let down (Sorry Dave). Terry Bisson's story felt like it finished halfway through. Alastair Reynold's story didn't develop and I dropped it several pages in from boredom. There were a few I couldn't get into right from the off. This is the best SF there is? The book is barely a year old and has a wide variety of authors, but as I said, the art of the short story seems to have been lost.

I also saw the remake of Conan The Barbarian (there are too many elements from the Arnie film for it not to be a remake) and was as disappointed as I thought I would be. Visually it was quite good, but as everyone says looks aren’t everything. The script was bad, the acting was bad and the fight scenes were too long. In the end it was the little things such as pronunciation that got to me. Hyrkania was repeatedly referred to as high re kania by the 'pureblood.' Archeron was pronounced asheron. I don’t know about anyone else but when I read Howard and that work came up it was pronounced in my head arkeron, as in arachnid. And I swear that after the slaves were freed the theme tune to the Old Grey Whistle Test was played. Conan was unrecognisable as a character from the Howard stories and the locations bore no resemblance to the world Howard created. Particularly irritating was the ‘I love you son’ bit from Hellboy and similar mushy stuff of the same ilk. Yeah, that's how barbarians behave in the face of death, get all soppy.

There have been some good things. I bought City of Ruin by Mark Charan Newton and it was a joy to read. I don't normally go in much for fantasy fiction or variants thereof (Bob Howard pretty much predates the genre and so doesn't count) but the writing style and world building made it as enjoyable a read as I've had in a while. Plus I've got a couple of old Neal Asher books which have elbowed their way up my reading list, including Africa Zero, which a few weeks ago was impossible to find on the internet. A revised biography of R E Howard was ordered as soon as I knew it had been announced and with any luck will be with me by the end of the month.

Quick Update

2011-11-26T14:16:00.001Z

No much going on recently, hence the lack of any posts. More keys are not working on my main laptop, which means it is getting unusable as the keys that have no gone are letters. I'm now uninstalling as much software from the computer as I can while I can. Loosing letters makes it far more difficult to use the computer. However, if I can use a USB mouse there's no reason I can't use a USB keyboard, and hence extend the life of the laptop. It' something to look into.

I've bought a lot of books recently, including tomes from Rhys Hughes and Neal Asher(direct and signed by the author!) so I have a lot to read through. There have also been books bought in shops as I used up most of my points on my Waterstone's card. Since they dropped the 3 for 2 it's hardly worth browsing let alone buying. It's a sad day when newsagents give better deals than dedicated bookshops.

Doing Nothing

2011-10-10T10:58:00.001+01:00

Not had much worth blogging about lately. Everything has been calm and quiet.

I ordered The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer Volume 2 Of Dust and Soul a while ago and it arrived a few weeks back. Not only that but I got a nice little bookmark thanking me for being one of the first one hundred to order the book. I've read through some of it and enjoyed what I've read so far but I'm saving the novella for later on. It's a numbered limited edition and I got the same number as volume one.

Also a limited edition is Spicy Adventures by Robert E Howard, which arrived last week, and again I received the same number as previous books bought. The stories were published in the pulps and in a paperback in the 1980s. I have the 1980s paperback and it's in quite good nick: apparently it's a bit of a rare item. Again this is a well made book, solid and bright with clean bright white pages. Taken from the original manuscripts the stories are supposed to be substantially different from the previously published versions, and I'm looking forward to reading these and the extras included in the book. I might even dig out the old paperback and see what the differences were from the previously published versions to the original manuscripts.

I noticed that the Waterstone’s shop I frequent most has totally redesigned their layout. The Science Fiction section has been moved and revamped, beefed up a bit.

I've recently picked up a couple of Neal Asher novels. I got his newest hardback, The Departure, and in the main quite liked it. At present I'm reading Orbus, which I picked up at Waterstone's in hardback for £5.99. It was in a section for reduced and remaindered books. Remaindered books used to be a few boxes on a table the back of the shop. I also got a collection of three stories by Elmore Leonard. I’ve read a couple and they’re quite good.

I visited Hanselled Books some months ago and decided to take a trip in again. I went a bit mad and got a fair few books, including quite a bit of non-fiction. I picked up books from a few new to me authors that piqued my interest and a couple from favourite authors. The non-fiction mainly centred on Scottish myths and tales and a couple of books about the Medieval period. The fiction was either SF or crime fiction.

Interzone No 67 January 1993, ISSN 0264-3596

2011-08-22T13:52:00.001+01:00

It’s been a long time, as the song says.

There hasn’t been much activity on the Bob Shaw front. I’ve only got one of his books to get in hardback, Palace of Eternity, before my Gollancz collection is complete. I did try to buy it on eBay but my best offers kept getting knocked back.

Once the hardbacks are complete it is then on to getting all his short stories, which means various Science Fiction magazines.

But, bought from eBay, was the special edition of Interzone by and about Bob Shaw: number 67 from January 1993. According to the Editorial is was due to appear a year previously but was delayed due to the death of Bob’s wife: indeed the issue is dedicated to the memory Sadie Shaw.

There’s two Bob Shaw stories in this issue, A Time To Kill and Alien Porn. There’s an interview with Bob Shaw by Helen Wake, Brian Stableford does a review of Shaw’s work and finally there are extracts from Shaw’s non-fiction book How To Write Science Fiction.

The only thing new to me is A Time To Kill, seeing as the other piece of fiction, Alien Porn, is an extract from Warren Peace – which is nicely placed at the middle of the magazine, and therefore has the staples going through it.*

I’m saving A Time To Kill for later on in the week, when I can sit down, read and savour a brand new (to me) Shaw story.

There were a couple of interesting titbits throughout the magazine though. Apparently The Ceres Solution was heavily edited for the UK edition – I’ll have to buy a US version to re read it – and there was hint that a revised edition (‘new, improved version’) of this novel could be released in the UK. That never happened but there’s nothing stopping Gollancz doing it. Bob Shaw himself provided the cartoons for the How To Write Science Fiction section. Also revealed was that the character from Who Goes Here, Warren Peace, was to have appeared in two more novels after Warren Peace. One wonders how far, if at all, Bob Shaw got with these?

I was also able to compare Interzone past and present. Interzone is still going strong, although it doesn’t appear to number issues any more, and is bloody good value for money nowadays considering the cover price of the 1993 issue was £2.50 (put up that very issue) and the cover price for Interzone now is £3.95. I don’t think that’s much of an increase over nearly twenty years.

*You have to read either Warren Peace or the story to understand this reference.

WebMatrix

2011-08-19T09:55:00.001+01:00

On the whole I find Microsoft products quite competent and usable. I came across Webmatrix quite recently, billed as a simple web page design tool, where websites can be created and published for free. The home page for the application had the Wordpress logo on it so I thought it was worth downloading and having a look. I already have Artisteer, and – now that a few settings have been changed on my servers – installing plugins and updating Wordpress directly is a breeze.

The first red flag for Webmatrix was that you can’t download and install it directly. It has to download a stub and then there are online downloads and installations that happen within another program. Twelve products in all were downloaded and the ‘minutes’ that it was supposed to take was closer to half an hour.

When it was finished dumping software on my hard drive I launched the app and selected the create Wordpress page option, whereupon it told me that MySql wasn’t installed and would I like to install it? I select yes and am presented with a request for username and password. Tip for Microsoft: don’t create and distribute programs that have this level of failure at the ‘create document’ stage.

It was probably the quickest time software was on my computer before being removed. And, of course, all the twelve applications had to be uninstalled one at a time.

Someone should tell Microsoft that installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to then install Webmatrix and add ons before installing the latest version of web applications is not simple but is in fact a fairly complicated procedure; particularly in comparison to something like Wordpress which does in fact have a simple five minute install. The database stuff for Wordpress is dealt with before installing Wordpress, not after. Simple fact, if software isn’t usable it wont get used.

Upgrade of Blog

2011-07-20T09:31:00.001+01:00

I upgraded Artisteer – or, rather, bought a year of updates. It’s up to version three now and had a few new features that looked cool. So I spent the money and downloaded then activated the latest version. It seems a little slower but at least it was able to upload successfully to blogger. The last time I tried that the whole blog went haywire and I had to chose one of the default templates, which I’ve been using ever since. A few clicks in Artisteer and then uploading it and the new template is fine.

Old and new

2011-06-15T14:20:00.001+01:00

I bought a second hand computer with Windows 7 on it – the 64 bit version. I’m not too impressed. I can’t run Virtual PC on it - well I can but it’s the new version that is integrated into Windows (with no uninstall) which is vastly inferior to the previous standalone version. It wont boot half the Virtual Discs I have and wont install without a fight some of the operating systems I have. I might have to install Sun’s VBox, which worked quite well with most of the old OSs I have.

I also did the usual uninstalling of software not needed to create more space on the hard drive. I came across a shook: Adobe Reader 9 MUI takes up 650 MB of space! For a PDF reader! What are they thinking? Microsoft Works took 750MB; it too was unceremoniously dumped as it’s the new ‘with ads’ version. If I need Works I have plenty of previous versions lying around. The apps taking up a lot of space might be the difference between 32 and 64 bit software but that’s a hell of a lot of space for a limited program such as the Adobe Reader; and considering a word processor, spreadsheet and database suite only took one hundred megabytes more.

The good news is that I was able to register my copy of Microsoft Office 2007 on it. I bought a 3 licence copy a few years ago. I’ve successfully installed and registered four copies, which over about three years is good – even though technically I’m only allowed three installations. There’s probably some leeway within the system; as long as I’m not installing it on hundreds of systems they’ll probably allow a little over the amount.

I bought and read One Who Walks Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis. It’s her reminiscing about the time she spent with Robert E Howard. I’ve been re reading a lot of Howard lately and one of the books I flipped through was the paperback edition (first time in paperback the cover declares) of Dark Valley Destiny by The de Camps and Jane Whittington Griffin. I bought it in the eighties at the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh and was a little disappointed at it when I first read it. There wasn’t too much available about Howard in the early eighties Scotland and it was like gold dust as far as I was concerned. On first reading it I was perturbed by the constant harping and sniping at Howard’s writing by De Camp: there are constant snipes at the stories Howard wrote, more often than not putting them down. I was puzzled at the time but now I think it was just jealousy on the part of de Camp.

Anyway, apparently Novalyne Price Ellis was angry at the way Howard was portrayed by de Camp and dug out her diaries to set the record straight. The result was the book, also filmed as The Whole Wide World. Another book followed later.

It was a good read but about a third too long for my tastes. I began to loose interest near the end as I felt I was just slogging through it and she was beginning to repeat herself. It did shed a lot of (her) light on Howard and was a good peek into the way they lived their lives in a small Texas town in the thirties.

Rediscoveries

2011-05-30T09:58:00.001+01:00

My didn’t May fly by?

After reading the two Howard books that arrived recently I went back to my collection and dug out some other books by Howard to read. I’ve went through a fair bit. I have an old hard back of Skull Face and Others and dipped in and out of that, along with paperbacks of Solomon Kane stories and other collections. (As an aside I recently saw the film Solomon Kane, released last year or the year before: abysmal, Howard would go on a bloody rampage against the film makers for such drivel.) His stories set in the Crusades are brilliant. A recent 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s had a – shock horror – short story collection among them. Collections of short stories are getting rarer and rarer nowadays: not like the old days when, particularly in Science Fiction, they were ten a penny. I remember I had more Robert Silverberg short story collections than novels from him.

Other recent rediscoveries were playing the guitar. I dug my guitar out and put new strings on it, and then dug out the 8 track recorder. I have an effects pedal somewhere but with the 8 track it’s superfluous. It’s a Boss CR-600 and a few years old but is still full of surprises as to the amount of things it can do. It’ll take me a while to build up the muscles on my left hand and harden my fingertips again – and get back into making half decent music – but it’s fun playing once more.

Small Irritations

2011-04-26T13:36:00.001+01:00

Easter weekend and the weather has been so so, which means I can’t get out and cut the grass; the dampness would make it too tricky to cut properly. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.)

I have no idea what happened on the laptop but something changed configurations leading to the DVD drive not being recognised, among a few other operating system anomalies. They were quickly sorted out though - after a few trips to the internet to remind me how to fix them.

I picked up a fair bunch of books at Waterstone’s, including some on special offer plus the usual three for two. The Templars and The Shroud of Christ by Barbara Frale was quite a well written and engaging book but had very little to to with the Templars; indeed it veered off in other directions quite a bit. Even more disappointing is the fact that it wasn’t the full story; the rest is to be in a second book. California by Ray Banks was bought because it was cheap and advertised in a small box as by a local author. It’s a novella – or novelette, could never quite get the distinction between those two – and started off quite well but sort of lost its way and in the end petered out. Entertaining but a disappointing end.

Possession by Peter James must have set a personal record; I decided to stop reading about one and a half pages in. It only cost £2.99 and is over a decade old but failed to set up anything straightaway, or engage my attention, and I stopped at a contradiction on the second page where the writer said it was ‘still dark’ outside whereas he had started the book with a pink dawn. The was a real lack of any explanation in the first page and a bit of where the main character was: if he does that right at the start I’m figuring he’s going to continue doing it.

The good news is that the Pars won the local top of the table derby clash and damn near championship decider on Saturday. They beat Raith Rovers two one and more or less (touch wood) clinched the first division championship and promotion to the silly pillock league. I nearly went to the game but in the end never got round to it. It was a sell out and quite a good game; I listened to it on the radio as Radio Scotland were doing live commentary. So with Kirkcaldy Kuffed it made an enjoyable end to an irritating day.

Computers And Software

2011-04-01T09:50:00.001+01:00

The computer seems to be fighting back recently. Or at least being a little recalcitrant. I’ve been into emulation quite a lot. I already have Amiga Forever on my laptop, which emulates the Amiga, and still use it quite a bit. I also have MS Virtual PC on the computer for older operating systems and trying out software I’m unsure of before installing it (or not) on the laptop.

Recently I bought some software from eBay and it turned out to be for the Mac and not PC (no response from the seller yet) so I installed a Mac emulator and used the software. That was very weird as I had a Mac emulator running inside an emulated PC. Emulation within emulation.

It’s been yonks since I used Macs; way back in the eighties when they looked much like the average PC – big monitor, box, keyboard – if not behaved like them.

I have some spare copies of old operating systems (PC ones) lying around so I thought I’d create some virtual machines while I was using Virtual PC. I got a shock when the cd for Windows NT 4 exploded in the drive. It broke into three pieces, spitting out one and dislodging the lip of the DVD drive. Luckily it didn’t harm the drive, which still reads CDs and DVDs, and the broken lip was easily clipped back into place. There must have been a crack in the CD or something, but it wasn’t noticeable before I put it in the drive: damn noticeable afterward.

I purchased Project:Messiah (bought three licenses actually) when they ran their Dare to Share promotion. It was a no brainer. A thousand dollar software program for $40 (about thirty odd quid after currency conversion). Duh.

It has tight integration with Lightwave and there are lots of video tutorials helping new users into the program. It is fantastic and I wish I could use it all day every day but my use is limited to a few hours here and there. It is the full animation package, lacking only a detailed modeller. It does setup, animation and rendering, which are very easy to do within the program, although rendering requires a lot of work to get things right. It started off as a plug-in for Lightwave but has since grown into a full package in its own right which is just as broad and varied as Lightwave.

I’ve been able to do a fair few things with Messiah. Although a lot of these same things can be done in Lightwave it seems easier and more pleasurable in Messiah. Morphs are a problem though. It’s tricky to get the facial expressions just right in Lightwave; it’s a lot easier in another program I have, Quidam, and I have considered purchasing an upgrade to Quidam as it does morphs in a new feature in the newest version but their web store is currently unavailable and I’m not able to upgrade at the moment.

I’m getting a bit fed up with Google Reader. Although it saves a lot of time and a lot of surfing it is annoying in that I can’t get rid of some blogs. A few of the blogs I follow either stopped or changed location – and feeds – so I make changes in Google Reader don’t I? The thing is Reader doesn’t want to accept those changes. The blogs I deleted turn up again. Then I move them to another folder and they turn up in the main list again. I’ve tried to get rid of them a few times now and in the end I just gave up. I ignore them whenever I log into Google.

I’m reading and enjoying the two R E Howard books that arrived recently; lots of good stories. I’m also reading a lot of non-fiction (another three for two at Waterstones’ which are building up points on the Waterstones’ card). I also bought Eye In The Sky by P K Dick. I’ve got buckets of his books but never got this one for some reason. Going through the list of books inside Eye in The Sky it seems there are still a few of his novels I still haven’t got or read. Also just got another Neal Asher book, a second hand copy of Cowl. I’ve just finished The Technician by Neal Asher and that was a great book; looking forward to Cowl. Also arrived fresh from the states – finally – is Up The bright River by Philip Jose Farmer.

Two Bob Howards

2011-03-01T12:42:00.001Z

And the Howard books duly arrive. They were sent from Texas on 23 February by Tom. So that’s under a week: excellent delivery from the postal service on that one.

And the books themselves are very impressive. Well produced, clean, crisp, and on very bright paper. These are wonderful books and well worth the money. Of course the content is going to be brilliant too – I’ve never read anything duff from Howard.

I’m really not too sure which one I’ll start reading first. They both have works from Howard I’ve not read yet, and they both have additional material which I’m sure will be illuminating.

Not sure if it’s easily seen in the above picture but I got number 139 for both volumes. They are already on second printings. The books can be bought here.

Reading Habits

2011-03-01T09:39:00.001Z

I used another laptop to browse the Internet while my main laptop was backing up with Norton Ghost – I’ve found through experience that although you can work while important system programs are in progress it’s best not to. Even though my time online recently has gone way down – mostly at weekends, hardly every during the week – the second laptop has picked up some malware. This is probably because it’s hardly used, and I don’t have any anti spy ware or anti virus on it, although I’m pretty sure the built in fire wall is on. (It could be because the laptop hasn’t been upgraded with the latest windows updates for a while.) So I’ll put it to the side until I can find a cure for the particular piece of nasty software that is on it.

I’ve read quite a bit lately - the books I’m expecting haven’t turned up yet; the Howard books are in the process of being shipped and the Farmer book hasn’t been published yet. I think Subterranean Press are doing a great job but it would be nice if they published books on time. All the books I’ve (pre) ordered from them have been late in being published.

I went on a Yurick binge. Sol Yurick is an American novelist probably most famous for The Warriors. I love the film of that book and years ago had a tatty paperback of that novel which has now disappeared; probably thrown out. He’s a very good writer and recently I thought I’d get a new edition of The Warriors. His books were so cheap on Amazon and Abe Books that I ended up getting practically his whole output – including a hardback edition of one of his books for one pence. Among others I’ve bought there’s been another 3 for 2 from Waterstone’s; two novels from Henning Mankell and a non fiction book. Menkell is famous for Wallander; the Swedish original TV series is quite good but the UK remake is pure drivel. I couldn’t get into the first of his books but ‘Italian Shoes’ is intriguing and interesting.

I’ve also switched back into old habits when it comes to reading. For the last few years I’ve been reading books exclusively; starting and finishing – or abandoning – a book before turning to another. Recently I’ve been going through more than one at a time. It’s pretty weird reading Neal Asher’s The Technician (a really strong book from this author) at the same time as The Histories by Herodotus, An Island Death by Sol Yurick and Menkell but it has been enjoyable. All these books were bought in the last week or so and I’m going through them at a pace. Maybe there’s something in reading more than one book at once.

More Amiga

2011-02-12T11:51:00.001Z

I haven’t been reading much lately, but I’m looking forward to getting three new books. Philip Jose Farmer, Up The Bright River is due to be published soon. I bought it when it was announced and looking forward to reading it.

I also ordered two Robert E. Howard books, and am very much looking forward to these, not least because they are pretty hefty books with a lot of content; some of which I haven’t read. But also because Howard is a very powerful writer and his stories are always worth the effort.

I bought an upgrade to Amiga Forever and have been using it quite a lot, particularly after I learned where and how to download the floppy discs from Magazines which had a lot of full programs on them. I bought a lot of the magazines when they first came out and, like PC magazines at the time, enjoyed the full software on the discs.

The Amiga (A600) fell out of use when I switched to PCs and was put away and forgotten. Later on I bought another 600 and a 1200 for £20. I swapped the mighty 20MB – yes twenty megabytes – hard drive from the 600 to the 1200. Recently I got them out again and they still work perfectly. I fired up the 1200 and used it for a few hours. The 20MB hard drive has several programs on it: Real 3D, KindWords 3, Bars & Pipes, Octamed 4 and a few games but the program that takes up most of the hard drive is the Dice C compiler. Back in the eighties I was into programming a little and C was the best of a bad lot. I didn’t like Pascal and Assembly was too obscure. C was comfortable.

I also got out a lot of floppy discs for the Amiga and went through them on the 1200. For being over 15 years old a lot of the discs still worked quite well, which was a surprise. I copied as much as I could from some discs to the hard drive in case I can’t access them in the future. (A lot of the PC floppies I have are unreadable.)

I tried creating a lha archive and copying them to a DOS formatted disc then getting them from a PC to my USB drive then I could load them in Amiga Forever but the DOS floppies were too badly damaged – add to this the fact they had to be low density floppies, which was superseded by the High Density ones a few years later.

Plan B was initiated and I bought a serial cable to connect a PC to Amiga. Amiga Forever comes with software to connect the two computers and transfer files. The XP machine however doesn’t have a serial slot on it. So I turn to the old Windows 98 machine. Great; this one has a serial port I can slip the cable into.

I set everything up and then turn on the Amiga and PC. The PC doesn’t switch on. It hasn’t been used for a few years but it was working the last time I tried it. Bugger. The PC is only about eight or nine years old and it appears to have broken down. The Amigas from the early nineties are still going strong. Survival of the fittest indeed.

Encounter With A Madman

2011-01-28T10:54:00.001Z

I have an alert on Google Reader for Bob Shaw which threw up a nice little surprise today. I knew he was involved in a television programme in the early eighties but couldn’t find it online no matter how many searches via searches in Google and YouTube I did.

Today it has appeared. The programme is Celebration, from Granada TV. It features Bob Shaw, Byran Talbot and the second part is a short film. The programme is in two parts – including original adverts.

The programme is quite interesting, although Bob doesn’t delve too dip into any subject – as can be expected for a 30 minute programme. The story is ‘green’ in its philosophy, quite a nice little piece but it isn’t television. It’s a weird mixture of prose, TV and comics.

Links are below but bear in mind that this is YouTube and all links on the web are never permanent.

Encounter With a Madman part one

Encounter With a Madman part two

Amiga Forever

2011-01-19T16:48:00.001Z

My first computer was an Amiga, an A600 to be exact, way back in the early nineties. At the time they were sort of comparable to PCs, but the PC then went on to expand and grow while the Amiga stagnated and went through a few different owners before going kaput.

It was a brilliant machine though, and despite being known as a games machine had all sorts of software available for it: from compilers to databases, word processors to paint programs. A lot of TV graphics were done on early Amigas. They were very suitable for that environment having Gen Lock hardware that could do green screening and mixing of images.

I mention Amigas because I bought Amiga Forever, an Amiga emulator, a few years ago. Recently I have been using it quite a bit and even more recently I upgraded to the latest edition. Then I went on the net and downloaded a lot of programs for it.

The first Amiga magazine I bought was Amiga Computing, and I bought it on and off for a few years until it – like the Amiga – went bosoms up. Although I suppose Amiga Format was the magazine I bought most often: back then Amiga magazines were like the early PC magazines in that they would have full software on their cover discs. Half the time I was buying the magazine for the little bit of plastic on the front.

The Amiga I bought still works – or did the last time I tried it a few years ago – and the loft is littered with bags of the floppy discs, so it was nice to be able to download most of them from the net rather than try and find some sort of floppy disc drive to read them and copy them to a PC (Amiga Forever can read PC discs).

The best thing about them is that they are tiny: they were low density floppy discs – which meant around 800k of data. It’s amazing to think that they contained not only a full program but sometimes several full programs, and I’m not talking command line programs either but full WISYWIG GUI programs. I’ve downloaded buckets of them and they are still under about thirty megabytes on my USB drive.

I doubt if any program on Windows would be able to even fit into 30 MB let alone under 1 MB. And the A600 itself only came with 1MB of RAM. So, on a low density floppy with 1MB of RAM a fully multitasking Windowed OS would run quite happily. Nowadays a PC wouldn’t even boot with 1MB of RAM. The processor ran at 6Mhz. The later models of Amigas ran at such ridiculous speeds as 30 to 40 Mhz. It just shows how far computing has come; we’re only talking about twenty odd years here, not a couple of lifetimes. But twenty years in computing is several generations I suppose.

So I’m looking forward to trying out Amiga Forever 2011, which has been updated quite a bit since I bought it; it now looks something similar to Virtual PC. I’m also looking forward to exploring all those old programs too.

Happy New Year

2011-01-05T22:52:00.001Z

I hope everyone had a good festive season. It's back to work for me, so holiday's over. I've been reading a lot of short stories lately, the latest, Crimewave (11), dropped through my letterbox today and I've dipped into it already. I wrote earlier about how a couple of Robert E Howard books went missing. Well they've turned up. They were found in a box that had old equipment in and had nothing to do with books. A tattered copy of The Book of Robert E Howard, a very fine 1980s edition (still smelling newish) of She Devil and one I had forgotten about, The Howard Collector, a paperback collecting various bits and pieces from the legendary small press magazine put out by Glenn Lord in the early seventies. I've had a browse through them all, reading bits and pieces here and there.

The bad weather seems to have rode off into the distance (fingers crossed) with rain now taking its place. Luckily the house scrapped through the cold and snow but there were some tricky times. It has certainly been the worst winter I can recall - temperature wise at least.

The credit card is weighed down this month, due to Christmas spending, and I’ve avoided any sales (which are year round now anyway and don’t end when January ends) while off work. Boredom can set in easily when off work and getting into the car and off into town centres is an easy option. Waterstone’s have a sale on at the moment with a lot of good bargains but I decided not to splash any cash.

I’m hoping that post hasn’t been lost over the Christmas break: I’m expecting an important document and a little unsure of how long to wait before phoning up about it.

I've got a new bookshop to investigate: I noticed a car while parking which was advertising the bookshop (probably belonged to the owner) and on doing some Google-Fu found out they've been going for years - established 2005. It might be worth the extra five or ten minutes to get to; I'll find out next time I'm in Kirkcaldy. It should be worth a look at least.

Bluddy Freezing

2010-12-22T22:33:00.001Z

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

2010-12-09T14:22:00.001Z

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

2010-11-01T16:34:00.001Z

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

2010-10-21T16:47:00.001+01:00

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

2010-10-07T16:43:00.001+01:00

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

2010-10-07T16:36:00.001+01:00

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

2010-09-10T15:04:00.001+01:00

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

2010-09-05T21:45:00.001+01:00

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

2010-09-04T11:53:00.001+01:00

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

2010-08-26T10:16:00.001+01:00

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

2010-07-31T15:44:00.001+01:00

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

2010-07-17T23:31:00.001+01:00

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.

2010-07-10T18:58:00.001+01:00

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!

2010-07-03T11:40:00.001+01:00

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

2010-06-26T15:27:00.000+01:00

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

2010-06-12T21:39:00.000+01:00

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

2010-06-10T17:46:00.002+01:00

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

2010-06-05T16:21:00.001+01:00

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

2010-05-28T10:56:00.001+01:00

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

2010-05-10T14:58:00.001+01:00

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

2010-05-08T22:23:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-30T16:16:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-25T21:39:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-14T15:00:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-10T09:31:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-01T15:49:00.000+01:00

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??!!

2010-03-29T20:00:00.003+01:00

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

2010-03-25T11:15:00.001Z

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

2010-03-18T15:21:00.001Z

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

2010-03-17T11:58:00.001Z

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

2010-03-08T21:48:00.001Z

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

2010-03-04T14:50:00.001Z

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

2010-02-24T10:12:00.001Z

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

2010-02-19T14:44:00.001Z

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

2010-02-18T09:44:00.000Z

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

2010-02-08T16:40:00.001Z

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

2010-02-05T13:36:00.001Z

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

2010-02-01T13:18:00.000Z

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

2010-01-28T16:44:00.001Z

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

2010-01-27T21:58:00.001Z

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

2010-01-25T15:21:00.000Z

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

2010-01-24T21:23:00.001Z

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

2010-01-23T19:34:00.001Z

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

2010-01-21T10:41:00.001Z

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.

Night Walk, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02071-7

2010-01-20T14:34:00.001Z

Night Walk is Bob Shaw's first novel. It is copyright 1967 and was first published in America and then in paperback in the UK shortly after. I have a Gollancz hardback edition from 1976 which I bought in the eighties and I'm sure I paid around £5 or £6 for it when it was 'new'. Since then I took the sticker off, revealing the original price of £3.20.

When I initially read it I did feel that it was a little bit on the long side for a novel, although for a first novel it is full of great ideas and vivid execution of the plot. It's an excellent thriller, with the main protagonist, Sam Tallon, put into an impossible situation. One of the most impossible for any human to be in: the loss of sight. There are plenty of twists and turns throughout the book.

Those of us who have it no doubt take seeing for granted, and damage to eyes has occurred a couple of times in Shaw’s work. There is an interview in Drilkjis number 2 with Bob Shaw where he discusses what he calls the Little Macabre Touch.

As can be expected for a novel dealing with sight, the loss of sight and the regaining of sight, there is a lot of vivid descriptiveness in the prose.

Right at the start of the novel Sam Tallon realises he is in trouble and ensures the safety of the information he had come across the galaxy to get, especially against the hypnotic techniques of the security services on Emm Luther.

Mankind travels through space via portals, and it is the co-ordinates of a new one which is the information Tallon has and should keep from the authorities of Emm Luther, and Shaw lays the foundations of the science of portals and jumps across the galaxy through Null-space.

It is in chapter three, as Tallon rebels against the treatment he receives from the security agencies on Emm Luther, that Tallon’s sight is deliberately and maliciously taken from him after a failed attempt to kill Cherkassky, a highly placed agent who had also taken memories from Tallon. Forced to accept the loss of his sight Tallon is sent to a prison.

In prison Tallon meets Winfield, who – although also blind as a result of a botched escape from the prison – is working on an escape plan using a ‘sonar torch’, and he needs Tallon’s help to complete it and escape. Tallon develops the plan by suggesting the use of small television cameras to beam pictures directly into their eyes. The work to create such devices is started and Tallon spends weeks developing sight for the blind, but using more than just television cameras.

Pretty soon Shaw ratchets up the tension with the news that Cherkassky, whom Tallon had tried to kill, is out of hospital but not fit enough to go to work yet, and so has asked for a ‘working convalescence’ at the prison where Tallon is.

Tallon is successful at using the system to tap into other people’s eyes. It works, but the rumours about Cherkassky are confirmed: he is due to arrive at the prison. But Tallon does not want to be around when he does. The escape begins.

For a first novel Night Walk is inventive, well structured, well plotted and an exciting read. I gave it a quick once over before starting this piece and I still feel that it’s a little on the long side – even though the novel is probably around sixty to seventy thousand words and would be considered lightweight nowadays – but that is more likely to be more to do with some elements of the book not quite gelling with me personally. The book hasn’t dated at all; reading it now no one would place it as being written in the sixties; of course the fact that it’s science fiction helps. But sometimes style and prose – and in particular attitudes – can place writing.

Even after Tallon escapes from prison there are still plenty of thrills and spills for the reader, and Bob Shaw uses the unique perspective of the main character and his method of escape in very novel and entertaining ways. I don’t feel that there’s too much character development of Tallon throughout the book, although the novel is an effective thriller as much as it is good science fiction.

Bob Shaw on t’Internet

2010-01-15T22:21:00.001Z

Did a Google search for Bob Shaw today, as I do now and then to see if anything new about him is on the Internet, and came across this nice little piece from his native Northern Ireland. It’s relatively new, December 2009.

Odd that the names that come up when I start typing in Bob Shaw include the Pipe maker Bob Sheppard. He was my maths teacher at high school – the other one was his brother George. They were both involved in the school pipe band – who were world champions I think – and the little less local Dysart and Dundonald Pipe Band, who I’m sure were world champions.

Weegies (shakes head)

2010-01-15T10:13:00.000Z

There's nothing wrong with Scotland nuking Glasgow wouldn't solve, but then we'd lose a lot too.

One of the blogs I follow has this: http://bigbeatfrombadsville.blogspot.com/2010/01/collection-of-thugs-and-harlots.html

I was captured with the quote "We have great anecdotes of people stopping fights to give tourists directions". From then on it got better.

Oh. There's also some crime fiction news.

Mantrap Caught

2010-01-15T09:43:00.001Z

One of the more elusive Bob Shaw hardbacks has turned up at a reasonable price. It was a bit more than I hoped to have paid but I let a copy of 1 Million Tomorrows slip by because I thought it was too excessive; obviously someone else didn't. A Better Mantrap was the first Bob Shaw book I bought and still remains a favourite.

Very few copies of the Gollancz hardback edition of A Better Mantrap are appearing online for sale, those that do are quite excessive in price (in my humble wallet’s opinion). There are a couple of Ex-Library editions being punted out for £50, pretty good copies are three figures.

But one appeared that is less than the expensive ones being advertised - the same books which I note have been available since I started searching for books to complete my Bob Shaw hardback collection and which no one has bought at their excessive pricing level - and I snapped it up. Ordered from America and taking a leisurely twenty one days to cross the Atlantic this edition isn't the most I have paid for a Bob Shaw hardback but it's getting there.

Dark Night In Toyland, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04448-9

2010-01-11T12:51:00.004Z

Looking back I notice that I've covered Bob Shaw's short story collections relatively quickly and Dark Night in Toyland is the last of his short story collections. With over twenty novels I seem to have concentrated a little more on the short story collections more than the novels. There are four collections in total and in chronological order they are: Tomorrow Lies in Ambush (1973), Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1976), A Better Mantrap (1982) and Dark Night in Toyland (1989).

I've enjoyed the novels of Bob Shaw that I have read but always found that a well written short story can be just as rewarding for a reader if not more so. And with a short story collection you can visit a lot of different worlds over a short period of time, whereas in a novel you are immersed deeply in one world. There are pros and cons for both short stories and novels.

I bought the paperback of Dark Night in Toyland second hand years and years ago and the Gollancz hardback online quite recently, both were mid price: not cheap but not too expensive either.

The difference with this collection is that it comes with a short introduction from Bob Shaw, which the others do not. It's a short introduction but an introduction nonetheless. The collection is dedicated to Arthur C Clarke.

Apart from the book Writing Science Fiction there isn't really much of Shaw's nonfiction available to the general reader, most of it is in hard to find fanzines and short run booklets. There is a variety of his nonfiction work available and some of it can be really hilarious. Shaw's fiction can be a bit overlooked nowadays but that is doubly true for his nonfiction. There would be room for a publisher to issue some of Bob Shaw's nonfiction work to the world.

In the introduction Shaw himself hesitates to define and bracket his stories, but would be willing to discuss it over a drink. As mentioned this is a varied collection - perhaps the most varied in theme and variety of all of Shaw’s collections of short stories.

This collection spans the widest range of any Shaw collection, from 1960 to 1988, twenty eight years and includes a horror story and a fantasy story in addition to the expected science fiction.

The collection starts with the lead story, and the one which Bob Shaw mentions briefly in the introduction, Dark Night in Toyland. And the story is pretty apt for this time of year too as the story takes place at Christmas. A couple worry about their son, who has cancer, and the effect his loss will have on their lives. While his parents worry the child plays with a Biohdoh set he received as a present, creating creatures from the set. Halfway through the story the child slips into a coma. This is a very emotionally based story, concentrating on the effect of illness on people. To describe the plot further might spoil it for someone who hasn’t read the story but it is one of Shaw’s deeper stories.

Of all the realities in existence Arthur Bryant in Go On, Pick a Universe wants to go to one where he is the most ‘perfectly developed’. It sounds like a kingdom of the blind situation but Bryant is assured of a triple chance – three transfers for the price of one; that’s a better offer than Asda or Tesco - and ‘The Probability Redistributer never goes wrong.’ The first two realities he is sent to don’t come up to his requirements; and the third one he can’t come back from. There is some nice humour in the story and a decent, if unanticipated, ending.

I don’t remember Stormseeker at all and it’s possible I didn’t read it when I first got the book as I have a tendency to dip into short story collections rather than read them from the first story to the last, so it’s another ‘new’ story for me. It’s short, only a few pages long, and told in first person. The narrator is able to see storms, in a more unique way that others and much better than any technology. The narrator takes a potential mate on a storm-seeking trip and gets a surprising response.

Aliens Aren't Human is a comic horror story and the one that stays with me most from this collection. The aliens are naive to human eyes but soon learn the realities of the situation. The humour in the story is very slapstick and farcical in a gruesome sort of way seeing as the humour is the result of murderous actions by human protagonists in the story, while the aliens don’t understand the implications or reasons behind the actions. While the humans are trying to kill the aliens the aliens think the humans are doing nice things for them. Bob Shaw calls the aliens Dorinnians, a name he uses again in Fire Pattern, although the two aliens couldn't be more different.

In Love Me Tender Massick, an escaped prisoner, drives across wild country in a stolen swamp buggy, and the petrol gauge is dodgy. He finds a house in the wilderness where he can stay for the night, although the old man there is reluctant at first. There is a woman there and the old man, Cromer, insists she is sick and he is looking after her. Massick wants the girl, but there is a nasty surprise in store.

To The Letter is all about a man, Hillowen, who wants to sell his soul but Zurek isn’t keen on buying it, but a deal is struck and – much to his chagrin – Hillowen finds himself ‘irresistible to women’.

Courageous New Planet is covered in this post.

Cutting Down is one of the longer stories in the book and is about Herley and his visit to Hamish Corcoran, who says he can control obesity with the use of pills. Harley decides to take the pills, is discovered by Corcoran, and a brief fight results in the death of Corcoran. Unfettered by guilt of murder Harley intends to give the drug to his wife.

Hue and Cry is told from the viewpoint of an alien creature trying to kill and eat the ‘two legged food creature’. Turbon is unsettled about the whole affair and when reinforcements arrive to rescue the ‘two legged food creature’ the story ends with a nice twist about the dangerous aliens and the differences between their males and females.

The K-Y Warriors is a bit longer than a lot of the stories in this collection and a lot on the personal side of science fiction rather than technology or aliens and alien worlds. Concentrating more on the relationship between husband and wife Willet and Muriel and their bickering it’s more emotionally intensive and mature than the other stories in the book. Things get strange and intriguing when Willet discovers that Grandma Gina’s fridge runs without being plugged into the electricity.

Dissolute Diplomat is the oldest story in the collection dating from 1960. Aliens detect a terran spaceship entering their territory, against the conditions of a treaty Hal Portman arrives and starts bullying the aliens. They get their revenge – intentionally or unintentionally – by a misinterpretation of a word.

In Well-Wisher Ibn Zuhain, Lord of the Long Valley, sees into the future and doesn’t like what he sees. He demands a change to the benefit of his people from a stranger who grants wishes.

Executioner's Moon is a short story dealing with Dave Surgenor on the ship Sarafand, the subjects of Ship of Strangers. Searching for possible survivors from a crashed ship Surgenor and another crewmember are captured and taken prisoner by a band of savages. The local king has knowledge of local astronomical conditions and uses this to his advantage and control the population: that knowledge is used against him to ensure the two crew members survive the threat of execution.

Deflation 2001 is a really short story, only a few pages long, dealing with union negotiations in a future world and someone is going on strike at a very awkward moment.

Shadow of Wings is the final story in the collection is a novella and undoubtedly a Fantasy story seeing as the protagonist is a wizard and it deals with the last days of magic. The wizard Dardash is tricked out of his self imposed exile from the world and reluctantly accepts a mission to kill the king Marcurades. Marcurades is obsessed with scientific discoveries. Dardash inserts himself into the court of the king and begins to work toward his goal of killing the king and returning to his solitude. But events take a turn and Dardash finds his attempts to kill the king blocked by other magic. The story is finely drawn, the plot rolls along nicely but the ending is reminiscent of the type of ending given in Well Wisher.

Some of my favourite Bob Shaw stories are still in the first of his collections that I read, A Better Mantrap, but I feel this collection is more varied and covers a broader degree of his work. It certainly covers the most period of time but I feel this is the most mature of his collections and the stories herein represent some of the best of his work.

A COUPLE OF NORTONS

2010-01-10T21:58:00.001Z

I bought Norton Utilities using a gift voucher. There’s now a PC World within a fifteen minute drive from me. It goes over two floors but I didn’t really see much there. I was disappointed about the range they had in the shop.

Norton Utilities was cheap and can be installed on three PCs. But it's not the Norton Utilities I remember using years and years ago. To be honest there aren't any actual utilities in this version. It's basically a registry cleaner, system monitor and other such banalities; the sort of thing you can get for nothing on the Internet. I'll admit a lot of the utilities from the old version that I used – and used quite regularly – were DOS based but there were some useful ones which could have enhanced the package by being transferred to the Windows version. It also required online activation. Not the best of things in my book. The online world has a tendency to change, and I've already 'lost' two programs because they were online activation and the companies are now gone. At least with a serial number alone if the company does disappear from the world you still have the software and the number and can continue to use the product. I'm not sure if I'm going to install Norton utilities on the other laptop. I'll wait and see.

The second Norton involves the fact that over the past week I have again been trying, here and there, to see if I can restore a Norton Ghost backup. It was a resounding success with a capital suck. I don’t know why I bother, and several times I've said I won’t bother again but there’s always something that comes along and gives you hope, whispering in the back of your mind it might work this time.

This time I was trying to restore the backup to a Vista virtual PC. A big problem was that I could only allocate half a gig of memory to Vista on the Virtual PC, and that means it is slooooowww. It would take up to twenty minutes just for Vista to get fully loaded and settled. Another big problem was that it was Vista installed from a disc, meaning Vista without any updates or bug fixes; plain (dumb) vanilla Vista.

Then the Norton Ghost disc wouldn’t read properly, which wasted further periods of time. I finally copied the whole disc onto the hard drive and made that a virtual drive for Vista to access when it started up.

Ghost still wouldn’t play ball. There was some error about destination when I tried to restore the back up, and any time I tried to restore individual folders I got an error about the back up being invalid, which sets off dim and distant memories. I took a note of the error number but it doesn't even appear on the Internet. There is always the possibility that it is but I don't think the backup is corrupt. Ghost can open it and view files, it's just when I try to restore it to anywhere that the program complains.

I could see it being error prone if it was written to a CD or DVD - that's what happened when I lost my hard drive a few years back, corrupt DVD, backup useless - but this back up from day one was written to an external USB drive, which is more or less a normal hard drive.

Norton Ghost used to be such a great program. The DOS version was flawless. The version I have, Version 14, is nothing but flaws. I got a loan of an earlier version of Ghost, version 9, to see if that made any difference. 2004 it came out; it's six years old. Dear me. The good thing about version 9 is that it comes with DOS versions. The bad thing about DOS versions is that Vista spits on them with contempt. Dos is totally gone in Vista, and the file system is NTFS, DOS is FAT32 at best. So I uninstalled version 14 from the Vista Virtual PC and installed version 9 on the Virtual PC.

On install I'm informed that Ghost 9 has known compatibility issues. So it's install and reboot. Ghost wouldn’t even start up as Net framework is required so install - no reboot! But I don't have permissions to run the damn program. First thing is to turn off User Access thingy then reboot. Now it's working fine. All I have to do is... enter registration number for Ghost and reboot. Bugger. On reboot I get 'the data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available'. The problem seems to be that Ghost 9 can’t access or see Virtual PC drives. When I try a backup it can’t find any drives. Virtual PC turned off in disgust.

Weird Tale

2010-01-06T21:34:00.001Z

So the issue of Weird Tales that I ordered has arrived. My very first honest to goodness real pulp magazine. Over the years I’ve read about them, read stories from them, read people talking about them. Now I have one. I got it cheap because it didn't have a cover and is not in the best condition. However it is the real deal - I bought a facsimile of Strange Tales from Amazon a few months back - and it feels good to hold an original in my hands, even if it is tattered and battered.

There were a couple of surprises. I expected more ads but there are hardly any in the magazine. That may have been because of the depression or it may have been just less ads for that particular issue. July 1933 by the way. One of the ads in particular was interesting. On page 141 right at the bottom was a small text advert for The Double Shadow and five other fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith. I've read very little of Clark Ashton Smith, I have one paperback and although I enjoyed the stories I didn't care too much for his style.

The odd thing is that it appears Smith self published; people could send 25c (coin!) to an address in California and would get the book. The address is very minimal - as all addresses at that time seemed to be - in that it consisted of Clark Ashton Smith, Auburn, Calif. No doubt it was good enough at the time.

Page three of the magazine had a full page advert, and it's the same sort of thing that still appears in adverts nowadays. They take a full page telling how people made lots of profit and YOU CAN TOO (free of course) but never a word about what it actually is they are selling or that people are buying.

The first thing I did was read the Robert E Howard story, The Man on the ground. The title didn't ring any bells but I have read the story before. It's a short sharp story only a few pages long.

Also in this issue, among others, was Clark Ashton Smith, HP Lovecraft and the final part of a Seabury Quinn story. Quinn was apparently very popular when Weird Tales was publishing his work during the thirties. I haven't read any of his works. I have two or three Lovecraft paperbacks and I sort of struggled through them. He's the complete opposite of Howard in that story is not in your face. A lot of the stories I read felt ponderous and slow but that’s obviously because Lovecraft is worshipped almost as much as Cthulu.

I read the Clark Ashton Smith story too; that also was only a couple of pages. I'll go through the rest when I get time - I'm a third of the way through a Doc Savage at the moment. I'm not averse to mixing drinks but don't like to mix stories (Shorts are always ok; either drinks or stories).

Another oddity is that there is a phrase 'copyrighted in Great Britain' on the contents page at the bottom. I don't know why they would mention that.

All in all I'm quite pleased with my acquisition. It's not in the best of conditions and it's not the most sought after of issues but I like it.

Tidying Up

2010-01-03T21:30:00.001Z

First brief post of the new year, two thousand and ten, not twenty ten, twenty ten is two separate numbers. I hope a good time was had by all.

I wasn’t online too often over the holiday period although I did log on here and there. I didn’t check any email though and am expecting a wheen of emails when I do log into the accounts.

I was trying to clean up the hard drive on the second laptop and gain some space. Although I took a couple of programmes off it ended up adding a little more as I synchronised Office 2007 on both laptops, with Word 2007 taking the place of Word 2002. Hopefully there wont be any more mess ups with documents, with defaults set to the new file format. Suspicious I looked around the program files folder and yes, Word 2002 was still there. For a while. It was quickly howfed, giving back about seventy megabytes of space after uninstall. But I did gain quite a lot of space by deleting the Virtual PCs. I don't use it much on that laptop and perhaps it would be worthwhile totally removing the application as well. Gdoc also came off as I didn't really use it; Jaws PDF creator is enough. GDoc has features I don't need and a new layout which isn't as intuitive as Jaws. Some other minor programmes were also removed including folders uninstall programmes leave behind, empty folders and the hard drive is now looking healthy for free space rather than pretty full up.

Last Blog of 2009

2009-12-30T22:02:00.001Z

Last blog of the year most likely. I hope everyone had a good Christmas season.

The weather has been Baltic, the coldest I've known it for some years. The snow turned to ice in some places but luckily where I am the roads cleared pretty quickly and were clear throughout the period of bad weather up to now, so there haven't been problems with travelling, just getting safely from front door to car door.

I have two pieces completed for the Bob Shaw blog and I'm going to post them in the New Year; stretch the blog out a bit seeing as there is limited material to post about. I thought Word 2002 was the culprit of file destruction but Word 2007 is just as bad, seeing as it wouldn't open one file and that file is now well and truly buggered. The piece was written in Word 2002 just like the other ones but Word 2007 says the file is corrupt. So, I'm not sure if 2002 is writing corrupt files or if 2007 just can’t read them and says they are corrupt. Luckily I copy everything into text files as backup so there is no loss of data, although there is plenty of loss of faith in Microsoft products.

I can't remember where or how, but I came across Doom Builder and downloaded it. I played Doom lots and lots when it first came out, including Network deathmatches with other people when I should have been working – the nineties were actually good for something. I remember that the early versions of Doom came with a one player three screen option. You could load up Doom on three computers and one person would have a left, right and central view. It was pretty neat watching demons come at you on three different screens.

Doom of course was a great game to play. I have it on two CDs, the Ultimate Doom and Final Doom. Contents of both CDs are about twenty to thirty megabytes each. I tried installing them but Vista won’t touch either Dos or Windows 95 versions. I have to install them (well Ultimate Doom) on a virtual PC: that works although I have to restart the machine in Dos mode. I wonder how many people can still use Dos nowadays? The exe file for Doom is under a megabyte and the WAD file (where all the data is) is twelve megabytes. I have Doom 3 and I don't think the full installation was less than four gigabytes. That's progress for you. Doom Builder itself is pretty nifty and it's easy to make levels with it.

I’m flirting again with Norton Ghost and Virtual Disks. I created a Virtual PC with the original Vista disk, turning the laptop upside down every few seconds so I could type in the serial number: it seemed like a good idea to put the serial number on the bottom of a laptop at one time. Vista Virtual PC created successfully, only a matter of installing Norton Ghost and then seeing if I can restore either the old XP partition or new Vista backup, although I’ve had that many failures with it I don’t hold out much hope of success. Vista took 4 Gigabytes in file size, which is a surprise as I thought it was a bigger operating system than that. Perhaps some zipping and compression is done to the virtual hard disk partitions by the Virtual PC program.

I read somewhere that the BBC has an official pronunciation of next year as twenty ten, not two thousand and ten. Someone should tell them that twenty ten is not one number but two numbers and is in no way a representation of a year, but, seeing as the BBC are thick as two short planks, I doubt if they would take a blind bit of notice.

I'm expecting a couple of books over the next couple of weeks. I bought a Howard hardback on eBay and months ago I bought Son of Retro Pulp Tales, which has been printed and the Subterranean Press web site says they are about to start sending copies out.

I did wonder if it had already been sent out and lost in the post as they announced they had received the printed copies early December. Luckily it hasn’t and fingers crossed I'll get my copy within a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to it as I spent the extra money and ordered the signed edition.

I like pulp stories and pulp writers (R E Howard, the Doc Savage series, etc) and the main reason I bought the book because it has contributions and new stories by Harlan Ellison and William F Nolan. To be honest if it was either of those writers I wouldn’t have bothered, but both of them made me bite. I'm also expecting my very first pulp magazine to wind its way across the Atlantic. I bought a cheap copy of Weird Tales, but I'll blog more about that when it arrives.

So, that’s it for this year. Happy New Year to everyone.

Email and associated items

2009-12-18T16:37:00.001Z

I logged on to check email and found that Yahoo have changed the layout of their home page. And it's a pretty crappy layout at that. There was a semi change recently which wasn't too bad but now there's a list down the left hand side of the page which irritatingly changes as you hover the mouse over an item. The delight of checking mail on Yahoo was that you went to email and clicked once. This took you to the sign in page. You signed in and read email. Nothing wrong with that. If I'm quick enough I can still click once on the Mail icon but that doesn't stop the page appearing. And nine times out of ten I get a 'try again' message before it whisks me off to the sign in page. I'm thinking of moving from Yahoo mail anyway as I've recently discovered - because it's recently been leaked - that they're willing to sell your details. The document can be found at cryptome.org.

I would prefer to have my own email at my own domain but I've grown too used to using Yahoo. I've had domains for years but never used the emails that come attached to them. The setting up and logging in to them has not been the easiest of tasks. The whole process is a bit too clunky. Where with Yahoo you sign up and sign in: no configuration of any Email program required. I've got a couple of domain names that are due for renewal early in the New Year but I don't know if I'm going to renew them - I certainly won’t with the company I bought them from. Their renewal charges are about three times what I originally paid. I might pick them up cheap elsewhere and I might not. We'll see in the New Year.

One of my emails was a free upgrade to a program I have. GDoc Fusion. I've owned and used this program for at least ten years. It's a PDF creator and viewer. It started off life as Jaws PDF. I got a free copy (two or three actually) from Digit Magazine probably ten or so years ago. Since then I've upgraded the program (always for under twenty quid) until the last upgrade where it went from being Jaws PDF Creator to GDoc Creator/Fusion. I installed the upgrade on my other laptop and didn’t take to the new program. So, even though I have a full copy of the program now, I don't think I'll be using it much. Too entrenched with Jaws I suppose. Like Yahoo email it's a simple to use program that does what it says on the tin. But the new program has too many unnecessary features. They have to move with the times I suppose but I'm not obliged to follow.

Wondering

2009-12-15T11:50:00.001Z

… if I've come across my first dodgy dealer on eBay. I lost out in bidding for an item but still received a second chance on it. I decided not to accept it - although there was no option anywhere on the eBay panel to turn it down. Ergo I left it alone. I put in a bid for a signed script from a TV show, after which out of curiosity I searched online for more details about the seller and came up with zilch. That made me a little bit nervous of the authenticity of said script. A website by a professional dealer would be the least I was expecting to find.

Someone pipped me by about roughly three pounds (the auction was in dollars in America) but the next thing I know I'm being offered a second chance to buy it straight away; within hours of the auction ending. With auctions starting and ending at all times people might not even heard they've won something until a day later. It was evening for me when the auction ended, I think mid afternoon in the states.

You would think that someone up to no good on eBay would be quickly found out hm? Not if they offer second chances: which is entirely acceptable according to eBay. You could set up an several account and get others to do the same. The other accounts bid on things. If they don't win fine; if they do win quickly leave positive feedback and then the item is offered to the second person on the list. I know this could lead to negative feedback from people but the chances are low: if anyone won the auction they would be getting what they bid for anyway. The reason for setting up the other accounts would be to drive the price up and generate good feedback. This of course assumes you're not selling dodgy stuff. I'm not saying this dealer is up to anything, just that it didn't feel right.

Anyway, enough paranoid ramblings. This Global Warming . ...

Strike One For Bob Shaw

2009-12-08T09:47:00.001Z

Bit of a play on words there as there is also a famous baseball player named Bob Shaw in addition to the famous Science Fiction writer.

SF writers have their hits and their misses when it comes to predicting the future – and technology – and some are more successful than others; some are wonderfully unsuccessful.

We don’t have jet packs yet so Bob Shaw can’t point to Vertigo and say I told you so (I know he has passed on but I’m sure he’s somewhere, drinking Guinness and pointing) but this, about scientists working on real slow glass, kindly forwarded to me by Bill Burns, shows that the ‘boffins’ are catching up with some of our finest Science Fiction writers.

First Week in December

2009-12-04T10:44:00.000Z

... and second time this week I've had to use de-icer on the car in the morning, where's all this global warming: I'm freezing. Speaking of Global warming the mainstream media are still ignoring the CRU email hack, aka ClimateGate, and not fully reporting it, although it does appear to be leaking into the mainstream in bits and pieces here and there. The Daily Express had it as a front page this week.

The USB drive seems a little dodgy; I may have to look into getting a replacement. The one I use is over a year old but I couldn't tell you how old. The drive is working fine; it's just that the casing is getting looser and looser.

Browsing on eBay I was doing a search for Robert E Howard books. Going through them I came across Wolfshead, with a picture of it - an American paperback. I realised I'd bought a copy from a dealer years ago and it too appears not to be on my bookshelves. Damn, what is happening to these books? Are the elves kidnapping them? Cos I ain't paying no ransom.

A right bucket load of Bob Shaw books appeared on an eBay search this week, foreign editions, original Gollancz editions, a lot of them hard back and a lot of them signed. Unfortunately a lot of them I already have. If I win the lottery (assuming I play it) I'll start collecting signed editions of Shaw's work. Until then I'll aim toward a complete collection.

All blogs are individual for this post. I use Windows Live Writer to post to up to four blogs at once, but I do have to log into WordPress now and again to sort the spam out and check on hits, if updates are available, etc. So this one is a copy and paste job into the various blogs.

Element of Chance

2009-12-02T13:41:00.002Z

Three Bob Shaw paperbacks arrived to add to my collection.

I bought a paperback copy of Fire Pattern dirt cheap from eBay and it’s in pretty good nick.

I also bought the American editions of Cosmic Kaleidoscope and Tomorrow Lies In Ambush. The copy of Tomorrow Lies In Ambush was also signed. This gives a little peculiarity in that both paperback editions of this book I have are signed copies.

These were bought mainly because the American editions have different stories than the UK editions.

However only one of those stories is new to me: Element of Chance. The others have since appeared in Shaw's third short story collection Dark Night In Toyland; Stormseeker appearing in all three of these collections.

Element of Chance itself is a short coming of age story which sounded very familiar as I started to read it, and I wondered if I hadn't read it before. I hadn't but the de ja vu was there. An alien being having spent thousands of years alone finds itself nearing the end of childhood and rebels against joining the grown ups. Bob Shaw uses the term skording in this story, which he used again and developed in The Ceres Solution. I don't think the thanii are in any of Shaw's other works but they may be.

The action takes place thousands of years before any life on Earth and as usual Shaw's storytelling is vivid and descriptive, painting pictures with words of far off worlds and of inside a black hole. The ending is similar to one of Bob Shaw's other stories, Well Wisher. There are a few similarities between the stories, it has the same play on words between story and title, revealed in the surprise ending. It has the same format of a story from the past which affects the future. Nonetheless it was an engaging little story and it was nice to read something 'new' from Bob Shaw.

Climategate

2009-11-28T23:16:00.001Z

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

2009-11-27T15:03:00.003Z

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

2009-11-24T22:56:00.001Z

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

2009-11-22T22:24:00.001Z

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

2009-11-21T21:50:00.001Z

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

2009-11-19T23:14:00.001Z

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

2009-11-17T21:11:00.001Z

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

2009-11-16T21:25:00.001Z

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

2009-11-15T22:39:00.001Z

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

2009-11-11T23:40:00.001Z

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

2009-11-08T23:47:00.001Z

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

2009-11-07T11:38:00.001Z

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

2009-11-07T11:35:00.001Z

Ups and Downs

2009-11-05T22:29:00.001Z

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

2009-11-01T21:39:00.001Z

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.

Friday

2009-10-31T12:32:00.002Z

the thirteenth next month. (Just added this so I don’t have thirteen posts for the month).

Unusual Errors

2009-10-31T12:25:00.001Z

All over the place. I’ve had a look at the Robert Howard books and I don’t see at least four of them. Sword Woman; there was an American import of the Spicy stories that appeared in the thirties which I can’t remember the title of; I came across the Second Book of Robert E Howard but noticed there was no sign of the Book of Robert E Howard; and similar applies for the Dark Man, I have volume two but can’t find volume one. That was the one I preferred, although my edition had a rigorous spine and therefore it made the pages vulnerable to splitting from the spine – and I remember that some had.

The web sites are back up and I’m told that there shouldn’t be any more problems but I’m not holding my breath. I contacted both my web host and ISP in connection with this problem, and my web host have told me that they have fixed ‘unusual errors in both dns zones for’ my domains. This problem has been appearing off and on since at least July 2008 which is the first time I reported it to them according to the ticketing system in their support centre, but I’m sure it happened prior to that; I just didn’t report it.

With the postal strikes in full swing I’m concerned about some items I’m waiting on. The Bob Shaw book from America hasn’t arrived yet, no doubt it is in limbo at the moment. I also have a signed Theodore Sturgeon book winging its way from America too and that will get caught up in the postal dispute. Plus I have a record (a real honest to God vinyl record) bought on Ebay which has been posted but no doubt is lying in a depot somewhere. I’m still going on Ebay but I don’t think I’ll bid for anything until the postal strike is sorted.

Books

2009-10-28T23:53:00.001Z

I was thinking of bidding for some Conan novels on ebay. So I went to my books and had a ruffle through them to see if it was worthwhile my bidding for them. It turns out not as I have some of them, and would only be getting a couple of books (which I’ve read anyway as I had them originally and sold them off) and would end up getting some duplicates, which I don’t need.

I regret getting rid of books – I bought Ian Rankin’s first novel when it came out and it’s apparently very rare nowadays, but I didn’t like it even though it was a fair read; it was some meandering nonsense about the growing pains of some boys from the fictional town of Carsden, which would have been based on the real town of Cardenden – but there you go. (I suppose it goes to show that Ian Rankin is a good writer as I can remember some things clearly about it, most notably – for some odd reason – their lying on their backs in a park discussing masturbation.)

On going through my books I noted a few things. One, I miss second hand bookshops. There aren’t any near me. A lot of the books I was picking through were bought from second hand shops. I got a lot of Star Trek novelizations and novels from second hand bookshops; a few from library sales too seeing as some had plastic covers. Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, odd SF collections, all these and more were acquired. There are charity shops but they aren’t the same.

Two, I’m down on Robert Howard books. I have about thirty including the Conan ones and there should be more than that. On the plus side I have more Philip Jose Farmer books than I thought I did; around twentyish including a couple I’m sure I haven’t read. I also took a note of the Doc Savage books I have in case I bid for more on ebay; again I don’t want doubles. I have around twenty. For some strange reason only one double novel. I did buy a fair few – or thought I did - but didn’t realise I got rid of all except one (The Fortress of Solitude/Czar of Fear), plus I only have one Omnibus edition. I remember getting a few of those too. Again twentyish Doc Savage novels, including two or three that were written in the nineties, although I don’t have the one written by Philip Jose Farmer, Escape From Loki. I also saw one Spider novel, two Shadow novels, the first of the Doom trilogy in paperback. I came across my old manual typewriter too but couldn’t get it open. A lot of TV stuff: the aforementioned Star Trek, Highlander novelizations, Babylon 5, X-Files, Red Dwarf. I really need to sit and rummage through them some more.

Three, the diversity that used to be in book shops is something which was taken for granted and seems to have diminished. i don’t think we have greater choice nowadays, just greater volume. I have lots of odds and ends that I picked up new in shops that would never see the light of shelf space nowadays. There was the equivalent for second hand books too: odds and ends that never appeared anywhere else except second hand book shops. I know the internet can bring you anything but there are times you want to handle the goods and inspect them before handing over money. And I suppose there are just times when you want to browse. Some of the stuff I had never heard of before and probably wouldn’t have bought if I hadn’t held it in my hands and browsed through it first, giving it a chance to pique my interest and make me chose to buy it.

Grumbling

2009-10-24T22:23:00.001+01:00

Not general grumbling, more like corporal grumbling. What is it with some sites? After they have loaded some are still giving the message 'transferring data from ...' down at the bottom left of Firefox with pictures and videos and stuff still being downloaded but no way for me to press the escape button to stop them. Well one site in particular does. I wont name it but it seems I wont go there too often either, which is a shame as I like the site. However, I'm not prepared to have it gobble up bandwidth at every visit. It mounts up. This month has seen one of the the lowest use of bandwidth since I signed on to Madasafish for broadband services. And this in the month when I found a couple of new sites, including one that has links to loads of MP3s. I downloaded and enjoyed the free preview of Tom Waits' new album. Pretty generous this was too as they gave eight full tracks as a preview. It was around eighty megabytes to download and I had to give my email address to get the link to the download but it was well worth it. Not a big fan of Tom Waits; I have one CD and a few MP3s bought from 7digital, but if ever the word unique would describe anyone it would be Tom Waits.

Have no fear the Man of Bronze is here!

2009-10-21T21:53:00.001+01:00

Well, three novels anyway. The first of the books I bought on ebay have turned up and I’m looking forward to reading some more of Doc’s adventures. It’s been a long time. I first bought a couple of the double editions way back in the eighties from the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh: The Czar of Fear was the first Doc adventure I read. I bought lots more after that but I also gave as many away – only a limited amount of room in my house – either selling to book dealers or as donations to my local library.

I got No 8, The Land of Terror, No 30, The Flaming Falcons and No 48 The Feathered Octopus, with more to come. I think I’ll start with No 8. I’ve started reading a crime novel, The Lost Sister by Russel D McLean, but it hasn’t grabbed my interest yet.

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush Part 2, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN, 0-575-01602-7

2009-10-18T21:39:00.001+01:00

The Cosmic Cocktail Party is a little New Wave-ish, starting with the line A highball on the human reality vector. The founder of an African republic is in a ‘tank’ neither dead nor alive, and communication with him is needed for the incumbent party to win an election. Aliens make a simulacrum of a long dead UK Prime Minister and talk about the Galactic Social Congress. They have been controlling humans via mind to mind telepathic probing and the new computer consciousness cottons on to them. This I felt was one of the least enjoyable stories by Bob Shaw I’ve read, but then again that’s only a personal preference. I couldn’t get into it as I could with other stories of his and perhaps the New Wave-ish impression was responsible for that.

… And isles where good men lie. This is one of the longer stories in the collection. An endless caravan of alien spaceships are heading toward earth, landing every couple of ours, bringing with them large scaly monsters that the military of earth kill as soon as they land. Col John Fortune looks past this and reasons there must be a signal directing them to earth, as all the ships are automated. He starts to hunt for this signal with the intent of destroying it and stopping the alien ships from homing in on Earth. Although it is a race against time adventure story it is also a personal journey for the main protagonist, gaining new insights into himself and other people as a consequence of his actions.

The happiest day of your life is a brief short story only a few pages long. Its’ form is very traditional, get the reader hooked in, build the story and leave on a high. The backbone of the story is now a science fiction staple: quick learning, knowledge achieved and implanted in a short time. Shaw treats it realistically: it isn’t universal or free, children have to have a minimum IQ level and the parents have to be able to pay for it. The twist in the story is an emotional one rather than a revelatory one but it is satisfying nonetheless, and the impact of the story makes the reader think.

The Weapons of Isher II is a decent enough story and you can see that Shaw is tipping his hat to E A Van Vogt; even naming a character old Vogt. And it goes back further than that as the bulk of the plot revolves around an old fashioned gunfight straight out of the Old West, but brought up to date in the form of a sport that is controlled and regulated – only one of the contestants doesn’t want to bother about rules. So a showdown is arranged for Isher II, where the weapons have an inbuilt safety feature, which features in the dénouement to the story.

Pilot Plant. This story is close to novella length and is by far the longest and most complex story in this collection of stories. It was first published in New Worlds in 1966. I picked up a copy of New Worlds with this in it, purchased online quite cheaply. The story starts off with an airplane crash and the main character, Garnett distinctly hears a voice talking before a part of the plane crashes into him. This haunts him as he goes through his rehabilitation back to normal health. His suspicions grow as events lead him to believe that something major is going on when his orders for the special plane his company are working on – which caused the accident - are actively ignored and countermanded. While he develops a relationship with his nurse Garnett gets closer and closer to the cause behind the voice he had heard until finally all is revealed.

Telemart Three involves a husband who notes his wife is spending a lot of money and does something drastic to stop his wife from spending more money than they have. As a compromise he agrees to them getting a special television set called a Telemart Three, which can delivery products from adverts direct to the home (I wonder if this can come true; Bob Shaw did ‘invent’ Sky Plus systems in one of his novels – I’m almost positive it’s in The Peace Machine/Ground Zero Man where the main character rewinds so he can be sure of a news report he is seeing on the TV – and there are such things as 3D printers nowadays plus home shopping channels are entrenched). Ted Trymble is in for a nasty surprise when he tries to stop his wife from buying through the TV.

Invasion of Privacy is a fairly long story and rounds off the collection. A young boy sees dead people then he is rushed off to hospital with pneumonia. The father notices something odd about the place where his son said he said people who were dead and decides to investigate. There he sees for himself people who are supposed to be dead and buried. In fear he causes the house to be burned down. In his mind the local Dr, Dr Pitman, becomes a suspect for mysterious and worrying goings on. There’s a touch of Invasion of The Body Snatchers about this story and also some similarity to themes Bob Shaw would expand in Fire Pattern. There’s a chance this could be considered to be part of the Fire Pattern Series, which includes a couple of stories involving The Prince. It was originally published in 1970; Fire Pattern appeared in hardback fourteen years later in 1984.

Overall the stories in this collection, Bob Shaw’s first, are rewarding, well thought out, and represent a good guide to the quality of stories that Shaw was putting out in the late sixties early seventies. There’s a wide range of subjects and themes and a variety in the length of the stories. If you want something to dip into there are short stories that last only a few pages, if you want something more intense and involving Pilot Plant, … And isles where good men lie and Invasion of Privacy are satisfyingly in-depth enough for most readers. Overall Tomorrow Lies I Ambush is a great collection.

E-Bayin’

2009-10-15T12:22:00.001+01:00

I got back into Ebay recently. I bought some things years ago but lost both user name and password so I couldn’t get back into that account. I created a new account and only purchased a hardback edition of Vertigo by Bob Shaw – which turned out to be ex library.

Recently I’ve used Ebay a little more, getting a comic – which when I got it and flicked through realised I’d already bought before; most likely from Ebay a few years ago on the other account – a Philip Jose Farmer novel and some Doc Savage novels, though some of the latter are still pending.

The Philip Jose Farmer one, A Feast Unknown, was bought probably late eighties early nineties and might even have been the first Philip Farmer I read (excluding his biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage). It was bought from the Bookshop in Dunfermline, now long gone, and I remember flicking through it and noticing that Theodore Sturgeon had written an afterword. Having Sturgeon writing an afterword was the equivalent of Five Michelin stars in my eyes and I bought the book straight away, read and enjoyed it. However, I can’t for the life of me find the copy in my books. I do know I’ve lent out books and not got them back but I don’t recall lending that book out. I do recall lending out a book of his short stories which I don’t seem to have either. Getting the new copy of A Feast Unknown I’ve started reading it again and have went about a third of the way through in one sitting – it really is a rattling good read.

Ceres Solved

2009-10-12T15:06:00.001+01:00

Just found and bought Bob Shaw’s The Ceres Solution in hardback via Alibris for quite a good price. The standard UK shipping was a reasonable £2.79. Considering that this novel has either not appeared in other book searches or been quite rare and expensive - even for SF book club editions let alone the original Gollancz edition - I'm happy with this purchase. It's coming from the USA so, at that price for postage, it might arrive next year, or it will arrive just in time to be delayed by the UK postal strike. :)

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush Part I, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN, 0-575-01602-7

2009-10-11T17:08:00.001+01:00

While I try and rebuild the blogs I was working on that were lost due to corruption of files by Microsoft Word (I’m guessing version 2002 is the main culprit) I’ll post some notes on Tomorrow Lies In Ambush, Bob Shaw’s first short story collection, issued in 1973.

I’ll split it into two, this being the first part covering 5 stories. The further 6 stories will be covered in part two. (Oops, 4 now and 7 later; totally blindsided by The Cosmic Cocktail Party.) I want to ensure there are at least semi-regular blog posts at the BoshBlog and that it doesn’t go dead for months at a time. I also want to ensure that blog posts aren’t too long. I’m not a fan of really long posts. I lose interest in them quite quickly. The equivalent of a couple of pages, under a thousand words, is a fine median methinks.

I recently received the hardback edition of this collection. I got the paperback edition and read the stories therein way back in the eighties. By the late eighties early nineties I had as much of Shaw’s output as was available. My copy of the paperback was signed by Bob Shaw, the first of his books that I bought that had his signature on them; I’ve bought a few hardbacks since that he signed. This one says it is ‘To Joan, with best wishes,’ but if I convince myself the ‘a’ is an ‘h’. …

Call me Dumbo is a short story where the dénouement arrives about two thirds of the way through. The rest of the story deals with the reaction of the character to the revelation, culminating in a calculated decision. The classic short story is to leave the reader with the twist at the end of the story, but Bob Shaw takes it a little further for a change. An idyllic setting is slowly deconstructed as the main character feels there is something wrong and investigates further to find the truth. Shaw does a good job of setting the story up and the execution is very well crafted. The pacing of this story is also pretty good although the characters – by definition and a little by necessity to the plot – are not as completely as fully drawn as could be.

Repeat Performance still sticks with me even after all the years since first reading it. This story is told in the first person and has a movie going theme. There’s a bit of Last Action Hero in this, with characters coming off the movie screen into real life, but Shaw puts in the Science Fiction twist – plus this was published long before Last Action Hero entered Production Hell let alone left it to become a movie. Cinema owner Jim is experiencing strange goings on at his cinema, with power outages and strange smells. Local reporter Bill Simpson thinks the aliens have landed.

What time do you call this? is a brief story with more than a touch of humour. Humour in stories was one of Bob Shaw’s specialities and something he did very well. A man planning a robbery is interrupted by a scientist from an alternate reality. Seeing an opportunity to use the other dimension as an escape route the robber goes ahead with the robbery with unexpected results. In truth if people think about it while reading the story the ending may be deduced but there are enough possibilities laid down by Shaw during the story to keep the reader guessing. This is a good little story with some neatly developed characters. That is quite an achievement considering the story is only a few pages long, and one of the shortest in the book.

Communication involves a computer salesman who makes a career – nay an art form - out of not selling computers; that is until a man literally knocks on his door and buys a computer for cash. But curiosity gets the better of him and he tracks down the man to see what he is really up to. The answer is a scam but the scam soon turns into something more real. I really enjoyed this story but felt a little let down by the ending. I don’t feel that it gelled properly, and there weren’t enough clues within the text of the story to point towards it as an ending.

Here endeth part the first.

Norton Ghost to Virtual Disk

2009-10-10T11:46:00.001+01:00

I had a look at this again. I have an old computer that has XP on it and I backed it up using Norton Ghost, which has the capability of converting Ghost files into Virtual Hard Disks for use by Virtualisation Programmes such as MS Virtual PC and VirtualBox. I haven’t had much luck converting this backup to a working virtual hard disk. I recently updated Norton Ghost and a couple of days ago thought that I should try it again.

There was a little more luck. Ghost was able to convert the backup to VDMK, and eventually VHD. I thought I’d cracked it when the VDMK was created, in 2 gig segments, but the VirtualBox programme turned its nose up at the files, saying it wasn’t recognised and giving an error.

The VHD format always gave an error and stopped halfway through. At first I thought this was due to file size – or to be more accurate the 4 gig file limit for FAT32; but no, it stopped halfway through when I tried to create it on NTFS partitions too. However, after the update, it has now created a VHD file, some thirty gigabytes in size.

Again, fool that I am, I thought that creating the file was the end of the travails.

Virtual PC didn’t recognise the hard disk. When I attached it as a second disk to an already existing XP Virtual PC it couldn’t be read at all. On rebooting the Virtual disk it wanted to check the volume for integrity. I let it, assuming it wouldn’t take long.

So I get up this morning and it has finished checking the disk and re indexing all the files. Unfortunately it wont boot as a separate disk. It appears to be missing at least one file. It can be read in the other XP Virtual Machine but that’s of little use.

It brings another problem as I was looking to load the machine and export parts of, or the whole, registry. In particular the settings for Sophocles. I’ve done some hunting on the internet but can’t locate information on where the information for the registry is stored: to be exact what file. I know there are various reg files on the computer but they are – or should be – extra files where information too large for the registry are stored. Apparently there is a limit to the size of information that can be put into the registry; over two k and it should go into a separate file.

At least I’ve made some progress using Ghost; from being unable to create any files to creating dud files. But I think that’s not too viable an option. I think the main problem is Ghost itself. It may be able to create virtual disks from back ups but they don’t seem to be compatible with the programs that actually use the virtual disks.

Amazon’s Run

2009-10-09T16:52:00.001+01:00

Trying to buy stuff from Amazon but it's not playing nice. It keeps asking me to put in my credit card information. I've checked the details in my account and the information is there already. Previous to this week buying from Amazon was as easy as a few clicks. I've also checked the address bar during the process of doing the order and I'm not getting redirected to a phishing site; it just informs me that the address the goods are being sent to is a new address (not true) and I have to re enter the details.

So far this week I've cancelled two orders just to be on the safe side and sent Amazon an email. First there was the final (?) volume of the complete stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Slow Sculpture (I tried buying from the publisher but they don't ship outside You Sah) and then today an order for the Region 2 edition of Logan's Run plus Logan's Run comic number six. I have Logan's Run on DVD but it's Region one, and I don't fancy messing about with Regions on the computer or using software to rip the DVD.

I just won Logan's Run comic number seven on ebay: there were only seven editions of this comic printed before it went kaput and I have the first five. I actually came to Logan's Run via the comic. It was a bright and shiny thing on the shelves of a newsagent in Cowdenbeath and I bought it and was hooked. They Film/Comic did the story differently to the book and I actually preferred it to the novel. A few months later I saw the film in Lochgelly (Lochgelly had two cinemas and Cowdenbeath, a bigger town, had one; now there's just the multiplex several towns away) and a few years later got the paperback, then the sequel in paperback and then the final in the trilogy in paperback.