chesneycat

Man regrows severed fingertip.   <--BBC news article is thataway down the link.

Read it, watch the videos, or just look out for the story in your preferred news media outlet. This is truly a phenomenal piece of medical technology, straight out of SF.

Wow.

[OTOH, it's probably all just bollocks...]

I just finished reading this last night.  Anyone else on the f-list (or elsewhere) read it?

What do you need to know? Well, it was featured on 'Oprah's Book Club', won the Pullitzer prize for fiction in 2007, and it's a post-apocalyptic road-trip, of sorts.

A few obvious comparisons spring to mind. Brin's The Postman, King's The Stand, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, children's stories like Z for Zachariah and other novels that I'm less familiar with such as I am Legend and Earth Abides (bought from the Uni bookshop, read part of at work while the computers were down, but for some reason I never got round to taking it home and finishing it). There's nothing truly new in the themes and plot-tokens, except perhaps in the complete ecological catastrophe that has taken the place of the biosphere - which is more completely wrecked than in any other book I've read, which possibly makes it less plausibe, too. There's a few spots in the book where the scientist in me snapped my suspension of disbelief, but the prose was so beautiful that I didn't really care.

I borrowed the book off my mother, actually - her local book club was reading it - and it left both her and Jez cold.  In Jez's case, the literary pretensions were the clincher... the absence of apostrophes (but not all of them), punctuation beyond periods, standard dialogue formatting, chapters.  At first, I felt the same way, but then I got sucked in by the beauty, by the fact that those stylistic pretensions actually work in the story's favour. There's no society left to care about grammar, no-one left to read books with any degree of literacy, and the presentation of the dialogue somehow adds both immediacy and a sense of distance to the piece.  Like an oral tradition story, unfolding in the moment, in the now.  Or like a dream, something remembered or foreseen. It's like the man has no energy for the meaningless trappings of life any more, because his life has boiled down to that one immediate need for survival. But at the same time, shorn of depth and breadth, it's still perfectly beautiful. Single thoughts, slowly taken. What's the word for... damn it, sentences that seem very disconnected from each other, like a sentence fragment scaled up to a paragraph?  That's kind of how it's written.  Again, it's annoying at first, but that didn't last for me.

Because all the way through, it's just so poetic.

He walked out in the morning and took the river path downstream. The boy was right that it was a good place and he wanted to check for any sign of other visitors. He found nothing. He stood watching the river where it swung loping into a pool and curled and eddied. He dropped a white stone into the water but it vanished as suddenly as if it had been eaten. He'd stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool, invisible to see in the teacolored water except as they turned on their sides to feed. Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a flash of knives in a cave.

Okay, so there is a comma there. But it's while he's reflecting on his past, and I swear that they only ever appear at moments like that.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from the start.

Deduct ten points if you don't know what I'm talking about yet.

It's a lovely, sun-shiny day, and I've just had lunch on the grass outside.  Delightful. A better excuse for a Bounty ice-cream bar simply doesn't exist.  Mmmmm...

We went to see 300 the other day, and Sunshine was one of the featured films in the trailers.  It does look pretty interesting - and you know what? They actually consulted an astromer about it.  Of course, they are kind of handwaving the whole issue of the spacecraft melting somewhere around the corona, but at least they've made an effort.  I like that, in a film.  As for 300 itself... well, it was fun, ridiculous and had more airbrushed pecs and cosmetically enhanced nipples than you can shake a graphic novel at.  But hey, we'd expect nothing else from a Frank Miller adaption.

I nearly forgot what it was I was going to mention about Sunshine.  They do see to be drawing on a few classic texts, and it'll be interesting to see how much is original, and how much can be traced back to things like Sundiver, The Cold Equations and others.

I'm not fit to travel, and certainly not fit to talk to the public.  Plus, I'll probably be stuck at the Hallamshire so long that I couldn't get down to Cornwall tonight anyway. 

I refuse to miss out.  So... it'll be a Cornish Pasty for lunch, to satisfy that need for a decent bit of red meat and veg.

I also need a good book.  Is Kay's Ysabel out yet?

I've just stuck my nose out on the "let's diss Todd" thread at AMCF, and declared that the novels on which the whole board is based are no more than beach-fluff. Yeah, well, that's all they are. Of course, I've now been challenged to identify what constitutes a "quality" genre fiction author. 

My top three?  I listed Kay, Mieville and Banks, with a lower tier consisting of Reynolds, Hamilton, Egan and Erikson.  Of course, I forgot to include Tolkien, Martin, Hobb and Bujold (the latter stradling serious and fluffy sf with remarkable skill).  Wurts has pretensions to these ranks, but her books are becoming somewhat overwritten, and besides, Arithon's already too much of a Stu as it is.

I have my list, of course, but I'd be curious to hear anyone else's opinion on the matter.  What do you think of my named authors? What makes a quality novel/author?  Who've I missed?


[Posting here to avoid the inevitable OMG!anne is teh bestest!!Eleventy! responses...]

Edit: the AMCF thread has turned into quite a decent book discussion.  Looks like Cavatica and I have very similar tastes.

Shamelessly nicked from spellwight AND jhirat_dai, who clearly read less Bujold than I do...