Ahira's Hangar

Yeah, that one completely messes with your mind.

Which one?

--A

Banks' Use of Weapons.

The Difference Engine by Sterling and Gibson. It's for my book group on Saturday.

Great book.

Hey...wait a minute...de ja vu...

--A

Catalyst by McCaffrey and Scarborough. Very short and very cute, written mostly from the point of view of cats. Non-cat lovers might not enjoy it, though.

Highdrake sent me "The Sparrow" and "Children of God" by Mary Doria Russell. I'm about halfway through "The Sparrow". Good so far.

Russell gets ignores all the relativistic mechanics, a criticism I've seen often, and just this weekend I was told the characters were hard or impossible to identify with and not very likeable. In my opinion, I don't think you're supposed to like them.

Regardless, I think these criticism miss the point and are sort of stupid.

I can easily forgive characters not being "likable" as long as they are well written (look at the great anti-heroes like Thomas Covenant in the first trilogy by Donaldson and Kenit in Hobb's Liveship Traders, not likable at all but damned interesting characters).

And yeah- people being negative the work based on that are missing the entire point of the books.

Angus and Nick were pretty unlikeable too usually.

--A

Which characters did these people not like, taras? I think Emilio is quite likeable, and I love love love Anne Edwards -- I wanna be just like her when I grow up. I'm even coming around about the Jesuits on earth. Except for Voelcker. He's still a jerk, altho he did have the grace to admit he was wrong. Eventually.

Maybe I've been inured to reading about complex, *human* characters by reading SRD, I dunno...

When you say relativistic mechanics, are you talking about the speed-of-light travel? I'm no physicist, so I just basically smile and nod when I read sci-fi anyhow. Doesn't hurt the ol' suspension of disbelief for me at all.

From what I understand, most science fiction writers are way off on speed of light travel and the like. Not having had physics since high school, and that more than twenty years ago, it doesn't really bother me as the math and what have you if they were to really dig into the science of it would be way over my head anyway.

Technology is blurring into magic for me these days. I know things work, but no longer know how they work. Take my new dvd player. It is something called an "uptake" dvd player. You put in a regular dvd and somehow it turns it into the equivalent of a blu-ray disc. I have no idea how it works, and frankly do not care. I only know it is awesome and I love it.

So if I cannot even figure out how my own entertainment system works, I highly doubt I could ever understand the mechanics of interstellar travel.