Second Breakfast

I enjoyed Feist’s “Riftwar Saga” as a teenager. Typical heroic fantasy genre stuff, and there’s some aspects of Feist’s fantasy-writing that are a little formulaic, but its enjoyable writing and plotting. His “Midkemia” world has the feeling of something that got invented in some late-night D&D sessions, and it lacks some of the organic “wholeness” of some other fantasy authors (LeGuin for example).
This is actually the third series in Midkemia, and I can’t recall if I read the second set of books. There is a lot of continuity in the story between each of the series, but Feist does a good job of keeping things accessible enough that you don’t have to be a devotee to understand what’s happening and why.

Summarizing fantasy or sci-fi plots usually results in something silly-sounding, so read the Amazon page if you want details. But of the authors in this genre (Martin, Jordan, Brooks, Kay, and so on), I like Feist almost as much as Guy Kay, and certainly a lot more than Terry Brooks, who keeps writing the same book over and over.

I didn’t get this book.

The basic idea is “What if the Roman Empire never fell?”, and the point of departure from recorded history that Silverberg uses isn’t, say, the invasion of the Goths, but rather the Exodus. No Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, no messy Christianity to apparently cause the Empire to fall fifteen hundred years later.

Even without this somewhat weird premise, this is a strange effort. Each chapter is a mini-vignette of some period in the history of the Eternal City. Good emperors and bad ones come, great challenges are overcome, the New World is discovered, eventually pacified, technology advances, and we experience all of this through the eyes of a series of somewhat random citizens, both great and small. I had to slog my way through the last half, thinking all the time “Why do I care?”

The culmination of all of this is another failed Exodus by “modern day” Jews (who are still Jewish, despite the absence of the defining event in Jewish identify) to the stars, which itself kind of comes out of nowhere.

A bizarre and unsuccessful novel. Cool idea, but Silverberg didn’t make it happen.

Yes, I watch a lot of television. But hey, at least I don’t watch a lot of commercials.

We finished Netflixing our way through Farscape, the sci-fi/fantasy series that the Jim Henson Company produced for the Sci-Fi Channel a few years back. Four seasons of great characters, sometimes really creative writing and plotting, a lot of humour, action, great sets and Ben Browser running around in black leather pants. Who could want more?

Its impressive I think when puppetry is done so well you forget that the characters aren’t actually real.

Great fun.

Now what? I’m thinking Buffy, but I could be convinced to put something else in my Netflix queue.

We rented “An Inconvenient Truth” from Blockbuster and watched it Thursday night. As I was paying, the girl at the register says:

Girl: I hear that’s really interesting. Isn’t it about Bob Dole?
Me: Its narrated by Al Gore, not Bob Dole. They’re very different.

Girl: So its about Al Gore?

Me: No, its about how global warming is going to destroy the planet.

Girl: That sounds scary. I don’t think I’d like to see something like that.

Me: Maybe that’s why they titled it “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Girl: Yeah, maybe.

When I relay the conversation to my husband, he comments that 1) people never talk to him like they do to me in public and 2) I should blog about these amusing exchanges. So viola.

The film itself was pretty good. I had visions of a two hour slide show narrated in Al Gore’s Tennessee monotone. Actually it was quite engaging, and Gore is a passionate and effective advocate for the perspective he’s devoting his life these days to sharing with the world. He makes the case pretty well that we’re on the brink of something pretty bad, and what I found particularly compelling are the bits of research results he presents that are “being presented for the first time”.

Last month I flew to Los Angeles for work, and on the way back I picked up Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” at the airport bookstore. The flight was 4 1/2 hours long, and I had finished all 624 pages by the time we landed. The book is a typical science-techno-thriller-adventure yarn, not incredibly well written, but the plotting is fast and its easy to breeze through books like this quickly. The basic premise is essentially the opposite of “An Inconvenient Truth”, and suggests that the fears and anxieties over global warming are actually being invented by the environmental lobby to sustain funding for the environmental movement. Crichton uses real scientific data (presented by his uber-scientific-adventurer-hero characters) to prove that the global warming myth is just that, and in fact in many places around the world it is getting cooler, not warmer. Of course Crichton is writing fiction, but the science he uses to back his writing is real, and in this case he references real data sets.

I walked away from the read with a tiny bit of nagging doubt about global warming (Crichton’s intent I think) or at least the idea that the real truth is probably a lot more complex even than what I get in the media sources I trust. But then I see Gore’s movie and I am compelled to pick up compact fluorescent bulbs next time I’m at the grocery store hoping my little act of ecological stewardship will prevent Greenland from sloughing off its ice pack for another month.

I don’t know what the hell to believe these days.