It all started somewhere last year when my wife was listening to The Killers. From fast paced “Jenny was a friend of mine” (ideal car music for sure!) to the laid back “Andy, you’re a star” it was all very enjoyable music. Especially since my best music moments are indeed in the car (two to four hours every day). And although “Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll” is pretty clear on what kinda music it is, I didn’t look any further.

Then when I was reading up on my Hyves last week I found a link to a fun webcomic. The main characters in this webcomic often refer to their social group as “Indie” and so it got me thinking… maybe I have more “Indie” music in my collection….

And so I started off with Aqualung. A bit more laid back then The Killers (at least more then Hot Fuss) but very much just as enjoyable….

So expect me to blog a bit more the coming time about my escapades into the Indie Rock scene and maybe I’ll even get a more outspoken meaning somewhere in the near future

The second part of “The Second Foundation Trilogy” was written by Greg Bear.
This part continues the story of Hari Seldon’s life where Foundation’s Fear left it; just before the trial that will send the Encyclopedia project to the far reaches of the universe.Where the first part of this trilogy was marked by questionable technology this second part leans more towards questionable psychics. The book delves deeper into the reasoning and setup of the Second Foundation, the group of people that is supposed to go and “lead” humanity through the chaos years into a new galactic era.

When compared to the stories written by Isaac Asimov I personally get the feeling there is way too much action and way too little analysis. Asimov was the master of the actionless science fiction novel where not much really happened except in the minds and speech of people. Novels that were full of philosophical dilema and deductions. Sociomathematical (or psychohistorical as one might call it?) reasoning.

The trick is, as stated with the first part of this trilogy, to read it not as an Asimov book but more as a story set in an Asimovian setting. All major characters and major locations are there but the entire goal of the book is different from what we’re used to from Mister Asimov. And when taken out of that shadow, Greg Bear is a phenomenal writer of fiction. The descriptions he sets down of the dawning of a new incarnation of humans and the reactions to that of the “Master of Robots” is well thought out (although I do find the trigger coming from the sims a bit forced).

Foundation and Chaos is definately an addition to the Foundation universe. It gives answers to questions that previously remained unanswered. It manages to do so in a way that makes the book a good read as well. In that way it does transverse it’s predecessor (Foundation’s Fear). The most important question that keeps bothering me throughout all of the Second Foundation Trilogy, though, is the fact that Asimov described Hari as being un-influencable by the mindbenders of the second foundation, yet in this trilogy he regularly does get mind-bent by the robots….. It’s a flaw in this trilogy.

It’s been three days since I finished the book. And I can’t seem to make my mind up about it….

Gregory Benford goes hardcore into Science Fiction. Not only on the mathist side of Hari’s Psychohistory but also on the sociological side. Even on the computer side he delves so deep as to virtualise persons and even alien leftovers from the past. Especially the virtualised persons seem a very poor hanger for a part of the story that just doesn’t seem to pick up speed. There were times when I thought of simply skipping those chapters to get back to the story of Hari himself again as that is, always, the main event of the book.
The “fight” for prime minister is another one of those story lines that seems rather unimportant at times and takes up rather more space then I would like.

But in the end the book does tell us a lot about Hari and his journey to the full Psychohistory. The book adds to the Foundation saga. But more importantly; Mister Benford drops a number of sociological points that fit very well into the current era in our own world. He takes Psychohistory research and projects it on modern day earth. Maybe not explicitly but implicitly enough to make the reader think twice about a number of passages in the book.

And when the story is finished the book ends with a chapter on how “the second foundation trilogy” came to pass. And suddenly a number of the cliffhangers in the book are given more meaning. Suddenly I very much want to read “Foundation and Chaos” by Greg Bear……

Two seasons have passed, time to make up the score.

Heroes is a story of a number of people with extraordinary abilities. Walking through walls, ability to heal, ability to fly. Basically your run-of-the-mill X-men variant. The way the story grows is a bit different though.

When I watched the first episode of this series I thought “hmmm…. weird…. need more…”. The series starts of quite chaotically. But rest assured, it gets more chaotic after the first episode.
During the entire first series one keeps on wondering who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And apart from Sylar (who can quite easily be defined as “consistently bad”) you never get an answer. Heroes does not have any good guys or bad guys. There are just shades of grey, and lots of those.

The second series starts off with a large time-travel story which I think is the weakest point of the series. Although the story is quite nice, the huge danger of inconsistencies lurks around the corner. The biggest problem, however, is the fact that the second series was cut short because of the strike of all hollywood writers, including the writers of the Heroes series. This leaves the season at only eleven episodes and far from finished.

All in all I absolutely love the series. Time travel aside the series will continuously keep you on your toes. There is no set morale, every side of the story gets airtime so you are left to decide for yourself who is wrong and who is right. In general you won’t be able to decide because most of the time all of the parties are right in one way or another. The Company is doing the right thing, but with questionable means. The old team is doing the right thing with questionable motives. I suggest you don’t wait for the ultimate answer as I suspect, just like in real life, there is none.

Although I’ve only read some 70 pages of this book yet, I felt compelled to jot down a couple of lines already.

After finishing just about all the books Isaac Asimov himself had written in the Foundation saga (started out as a trilogy, now counts a whole lot more then three books) and his Empire and Robot sagas, I went looking for more books in the same genre (“Hard Science Fiction” people call it) where the story isn’t the only important part of the book. Isaac manages to give the reader the idea that the story is second to the underlying principles. I’m sure I’ll write more about that in a post on Mister Asimov himself some day.

I’d bought “The Second Foundation Trilogy” as these three books are called with the thought that they’d be the same as Asimov’s work. After reading about ten pages from Foundation’s Fear I had to drop the book. It was nothing like Asimov’s work and I thought it paled in comparison. Where Asimov concentrated on character and storyline, Benford did more in location description and looks. I was disappointed and decided to put the book back on the shelf. Not the Asimov shelf, mind you, but the “Books by other the then original writer” shelf next to the Dragonlance books that weren’t written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

After reading Gibson’s Neuromancer I decided to give it another try. There aren’t that many good books out there and I’d regret not having read this if it did turn out to be one. I decided to read it as if it had no relation to the foundation series so that I couldn’t be disappointed.
The second try was a lot more impressive though. After the initial “fluff” Mister Benford does get to the point. And at about page 70 he is now even more hardcore then the Asimov books ever were. Not only does he delve deeper into the scientific principles behind what our main character, Hari Seldon, is doing. He delves deeper into them then Asimov dared, going almost to the point where the reader has a hard time following. Sometimes I do lose track of what he’s trying to tell.

I won’t put a rating on this book yet. I’ll do that when I finish it. I can tell you that I do expect it to be a nice rating though

A long, long time ago….. When the grass was still blue and the sky green and Croga was just an itty bitty little boy, there was Battlestar Galactica. A hero saga of Apollo and Starbuck and Adama fighting against the robotic Cylon to find their way Home to Earth…..

But that was long ago. In 2005, after a large number of rewrites and a lot of discussion between possible directors, the Pilot “miniseries” Battlestar Galactica 2005 (original name ) is broadcast on Sci-Fi channel.
The success of the mini series is enough to warant setting up a complete series.

Where the original series was indeed a heroic epic, the new series takes a kind of “cyberpunk” approach (to just make a sideway link to my earlier review ). Adama is now played by Edward James Olmos who also played in Miami Vice around the time of the original series. He looks the part of the old Battlestar commander that had rather retired but now holds a ceremonial function.

The scenery has change a lot since the original series as well. The Battlestar is now indeed an old relic, left over from times gone by. The use of lighting (or actually; the use of lack of lighting) here and there emphasizes this. Scenes on planets are shot using high color saturation to give an alien look but also to, again, emphasize the feeling that there is no future for the fugitives. This last idea is felt throughout the series. Even though the characters all try to keep a positive outlook on the future, the reality of futility is clear.

All in all I get the feeling that the main audience of this new series is the same as the main audience of the original series. The same people, only 20 years older. I myself was a teenager when the first series was on television; the perfect target audience for a heroic science fiction series. I’m in my thirties now and the way the new series has been set up finds me looking forward to every next episode.

‘Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre noted for its focus on “high tech and low life”.’ says Wikipedia. Neuromancer was one of the first books in this genre.

The first chapter of the book is kinda hard to get through. It’s basically a description of a place where you won’t want to be seen through the eyes of a person you wouldn’t want to be. There’s no real visible goal to the story nor really any entertainment value. No intelligent conversations. This changes when this person (Case is his name) gets contacted by people that can and will put him back into business.
One will find that a number of decent reviews exist on the internet that further explore the story, plot, characters and importance of the story.

Looking at the way the book was written, William Gibson guides us through the Earth of that time by use of extensive descriptions of locations. Every chair and desk in every hotel chamber is meticulously detailed and the workings of every knife and gun is put into words. Gibson seems to find the reasoning of the characters and the general situation less important whilst the specifics get a lot of attention.
Even though I would personally have preferred to get more information on general situation and more building of the characters, the way Gibson does describe the situations and the background picture is done expertly. Reading the descriptions gives one a vision of a future where all the good things in life have disappeared.

Although Neuromancer (or more precisely: Cyberpunk) isn’t really my genre, I did enjoy reading the book. It did not captivate me as much as I would like but William Gibson succeeds in painting a vision of the future that we might want to try and avoid.

In the beginning there was Croga. And then he had the vague idea that all the reading he did might be good for the rest of the world

It’s an experiment at the moment, maybe it’ll grow bigger. I’ll use this blog mainly to post reviews of books I’ve read and quite likely it’ll expand into reviews of other stuff in the future.