Street Map

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

Pruning and stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ides of March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dry Patch

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

The Dry Patch – A Great Detective Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Songs and Parodies

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

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

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

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

Boot Fuh'n Time Te

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

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

(Son of Retro cover)           

                                     

  

   (First page of signatures)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Bob

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Doc Mags

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

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

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