The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Fiction

  • The Dresden Files

    I’m a big fan of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series of books. I had the privilege of seeing Mr. Butcher at this year’s Dragon*Con. Now, the Sci-Fi channel has turned the series into a television serial, with mixed-positive, results, in my opinion.

    As a caveat, I must note that this television series has always been intended as a parallel universe to the books. It will go off in new directions, with new stories, and I acknowledge that.

    I do have a few gripes. One, Lt. Karin Murphy is a brunette, and Susan Gonzales is a blonde. Blah. How difficult is it to procure people with correct hair colors, especially given that Susan’s hair is obviously dyed? Two, Bob’s sarcasm is part of his schtick, and I miss it in the TV show. Three, why is Justin DuMorne alive? That’s just confusing. Four? Well, we’ll wait for next week’s episode.

    Now that I’ve ragged on the show, I should say that I liked it! I thought Paul Blackthorne did an excellent job portraying Harry, and although it looks like they’ve dropped the poorer-than-dirt aspects of the character, I still like his earthiness.

    Of course, once again there’s a tv show involving a HUGE urban apartment that no one outside of stock broker or lawyer or real estate developer could afford. Why can’t poor people live in small apartments?

    Here are some comments by Jim Butcher himself in a news article out of Toronto

  • Science Fiction Spacecraft

    It’s because I read The Bad Astronomy Blog that I get links like this major freaking awesome comparison of sizes between various science fiction spacecraft.

    Go and ogle.

  • Book Reviews redux

    19 book reviews on the 14th of January. 315 pages per book(taken from the Amazon.com statistics, which admittedly, contain blank pages and title pages, etc.) 5,984 pages in one day. I’m impressed, as always, by Ms. Harriet Klausner.

    Useless crap.

  • James Cameron is the Man!

    James Cameron is exploring new territory, as usual. He will be coming out with a movie that pushes boundaries back, just like The Terminator, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Titanic.

    This project (which isn’t exactly new, but I just heard about it) will combine live action actors and the technology that brought the world Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, plus it will filmed and broadcast in 3D!

    The motion capture techniques used for Gollum will be updated and used to map live action movements onto alien bodies in a manner that is supposed to be seamless and indistinguishable from actual actors.

    This has me excited! I can hardly wait…until 2009 when it will be released. The title is Avatar, and you can catch it at IMDB or at Wikipedia.

  • Young Adult Fiction

    Sometimes I’m suprised after reading a book that it was classified as “Young Adult” literature. Retrospectively, I shouldn’t be because the subject matter usually deals with a young person overcoming obstacles or coming of age, etc. The Belgariad, Harry Potter, Eragon, etc., have all entertained me to the point where I would recommend them to anybody, not just young adults.

    This blog entry has some amusing answers to the question, “What is Young Adult literature?”

  • Why You Shouldn't Recommend Books

    I have given up taking book recommendations from the masses. I am a quick reader, but I won’t read things if I don’t like them, or if they don’t entertain me. I have developed opinions about novels over the course of my reading career and I don’t like to force a novel past my eyes. I haven’t read past the first chapter of Moby Dick, and probably never will. I did not particularly like Neuromancer. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is horribly long-winded and if I wasn’t already hooked by his other books, I never would have gotten past the third chapter. The Jungle put me to sleep, depressed. Yet there are books I love that I know would make people scratch their heads and wonder what I was smoking.

    Recently there was a call from Pharyngula to recommend Science Fiction books for young readers. The conclusion I drew from reading the responses was that it was a bell-shaped distribution ranging from crazy to excellent. Most of the responses (in my opinion, of course) were reasonable, while some steered people away from (imo) good books and others steered people toward bad ones. The final decision: Mass Book Recommendations are utterly useless. Or maybe udderly useless as you get stampeded toward the mainstream (Of course, there are some excellent books that everyone has read. “Exception to every rule,” and all that).

    I am personally of the opinion, as evidenced in the Harriet Klausner post, that you should take a book recommendation with a large grain of salt until you and the reviewer develop a relationship. I have friends whose book taste I know and vice versa. I don’t feel like I’m leading them astray when I tell them “read this, don’t read that.” Likewise, there are a few professional reviewers that I trust to accurately predict my enjoyment of a book (there are those reviewers whom I can trust to hate anything I’d like, too, which is an accurate prediction.)

    Of course, you shouldn’t depend on anyone’s judgement for reading. Not mine, not your brother’s, not the NY Times, not anybody! You should merely pick something up and read it. If you don’t like it, move on. That’s a great way to review books!

  • Harriet Klausner

    You learn new things every day. Not necessarily useful things, but things. Possibly, these various items may pop up in a bar quiz someday. I can only hope.

    Today’s thing is Harriet Klausner. This was clued to me by one of SFSignal’s various tidbit posts. This post lists a comment train that has been continuing for over 3 years now and is quite educational.

    Harriet Klausner is Amazon.com’s #1 reviewer. “She” has reviewed more books than anyone else. As of today, she has written 12,939 reviews in almost the exact same format (three paragraph summation with a 4 or 5 star rating). This woman is either a front for a large set of people or someone who might possibly be lying to us.

    I base this on the following data, drawn from Amazon’s list of her reviewed books.

    • She reviewed 19 books on December 10 2006
    • 59 books on December 9 2006
    • 3 on December 8
    • 1 on December 7
    • 1 on December 6
    • 15 on Decmber 3
    • 10 on December 2

    I gave up at this point. I went to page 99 intending to find the date of the last review on that page. Then I decided to make sure I counted all the reviews done that day. I ended up on page 106! The date was August 2, 2006. Checking all of the August 2 pages, it ends up that 102(!) reviews were published that day.

    So, if I do my math right, between August 2 and December 26 we have 146 days. Over the course of that time “Harriet Klausner” has posted 7.27 reviews per day. But, let us not discount what she said in her Wired interview.

    Klausner, for one, has a day job to supplement her income. She works as a paid columnist in two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur.

    Also

    She never deliberately criticizes an author and she doesn’t accept gifts or money when writing about a book.

    So, here’s a woman with a day job, who never deliberately criticizes authors, yet (from not-so-random-sampling by yours truly and through affirmations by others) never gives less than 4 stars on Amazon, and reviews 7.27 books per day. The first ten books in her reviewed list as of today, the 26th of December, averaged 423 pages. So she reads and reviews 3075 pages every single day, including weekends, while holding down a paying job, and presumably reading the first 50 pages of at least the occasional novel she does not like. Let’s be generous and reverse Sturgeon’s Law and call 90% of the novels she reads good and the last 10% crap. That leaves us with a grand total of 3113 pages per day every day all year long.

    She must be keeping bandage companies in business with all of her paper cuts.

    This is a bunch of crap. No one can honestly, ethically, review this many books every day and have more to say that banal generalities that we can get from the book jacket. If she is telling the truth and does read this much, I have no need to read her stuff; it will be trite and useless to me. If she is not telling the truth and has a team behind the name, then why don’t they publish better reviews? Read some if you don’t believe me…

    I have nothing deep to say about this, other than it reinforces my belief that you cannot trust book reviews or reviewers unless you actually know the person who did the reviewing.

    While paging through her listing of reviewed books, I noticed that one of them was a book of photography. I might be able to believe she can speed read her way through 3113 pages, but a book of photography is not a novel. It would require a different mindset to “speedread.” Yes, I realize it’s only one book, but it’s proof of principle. My principle.

  • Transformers Trailer

    There’s a new trailer out for the Transformers movie coming next summer.

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!

    J.K. Rowling has named book 7!

    I object, though. When I read this bbc article it said, “The announcement was made on the writer’s official website.” I immediately (we’re talking nanoseconds, here) went to the official website and found…nothing. Just her update from the 19th.

    Hmmmm…

    Maybe it got retracted? Maybe BBC jumped the gun? Who knows. There’s a title and that’s awesome.

    I’m curious about the title. “Hallows” usually referes to samhain/halloween/all hallows eve. I wonder [dum dum dum] if something critical and important will happen on halloween? It would be unusual for her book to end on halloween, but we’ll see. She might throw the school-year idea out the window, but then Harry still needs time to track down the remaining horcruxes.

    For more of my idle speculation, go here.

  • Woo Woo Woo: Crazy Land

    Through random occurrence, I popped over to the Troubled Times website. I was under the impression before clicking through that it was a survivalist/preparation website. Given some of the apolocalyptic fiction I read, there’s interest for me there.

    However, survival was only the skin of what I found.

    Troubled Times believes that a world-wide cataclysm, of massive proportions, will strike the Earth in 2003 or shortly thereafter. The cause of this natural event will be a monster planet, known to the ancients but as yet undiscovered by modern man, which will pass very near the earth as part of its normal 3,600 year orbit around the sun.

    If you poke around, you discover what will happen when the 12th (what happened to 10th and 11th?) planet goes by:

    …as this magnetic giant passes by, it will force our North and South Poles to rotate 90 degrees. The shifting poles will drag the Earth’s crust with them, ultimately producing a new global map in a matter of hours in a massive cataclysm affecting all life on earth. These events have occurred before, as ancient legends and Prophecies fortell, creating what man interprets to be ice ages, wandering poles and the flood, and have resulted in the extinction of the Mastodon and the sinking of Atlantis.

    We know this because the aliens told us:

    The Zetas are a group of Service-to-Other Beings who are assisting this planet and it’s people in the transformation from 3rd to 4th density. This Transformation is happening now, and will be completed sometime after the passage of the 12th Planet, and the resulting Pole Shift that this passage will cause.

    I recommend this website just for the amusment.

    Of course, this is all bogus crap. Leaving aside the fact that Spacewatch as well as a host of amateur astronomers would certainly have seen anything that is, “…4 times larger and 23 times more dense than Earth,” the website is chock full of alien gobbledygook and bad physics and alien conspiracies.