HSU IT Department

Mr Psmith and started a revisit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer about a month ago; we began with Episode 1, Season 1 and have been working our way through it, relishing every minute of it, and finally finished last night. I'd forgotten what emotional powerhouses the last few episodes are, just one thing after another: Xander's speech to the Potentials about Buffy, Faith's return and what it triggers, Willow's activation of all the Potentials, and -- of course -- Spike. I cried like a baby for half of the last episode and was totally wrung out by the time we got to the end.

We talked for a while afterwards about what exactly it is that makes Buffy so great: the writing with its clever use of language, the great storytelling, the three-dimensional characters? We determined it's all of the above, but two things in particular stand out. First, there's the constant reassuring sense that Joss knows where he's going with it, where he's taking you. He's never just killing time or floundering about. Almost every episode adds something to the overall structure of the tale: expanded understanding of a character, character growth, fleshing out the Slayer mythos/backstory, propelling the story arc forward (even the musical episode wasn't just a gimmick, it actually advance the plot in important ways), etc. Second, there's the way that so much of the time he's exploring aspects of what it means to be human: guilt, free will, family, love, faith, what it means to be/feel different, what it means to have/not have a soul, can evil be redeemed. Not every episode is all deep and philosophical, but even the funny ones often deal with larger questions. That gives the show overall a substance and a depth that others like Charmed and Supernatural can't quite match.

In other news, I'd gotten sadly behind on my book reviews on goodreads, so I took advantage of having today off (Memorial Day for us Yanks) to get caught up. Rather than posting all of them here, I'll just give a snippet and link through for anyone who's interested. It's quite an assortment: one non-fiction, two Stephen Kings, a psychological thriller, and a kids' fantasy. My reading tastes are a bit eclectic, as you can see :)

For me, Hogwarts will always hold the crown for Best Sentient Castle, but I did enjoy my visit to Castle Glower. The title is a bit misleading, since the castle doesn't in fact only change on Tuesdays but rather whenever it feels like it, or whenever it's necessary, but that's a minor point... more

It's tough to decide which story here is the more engrossing in The Spark: Jake the math and physics savant whose mind was nearly lost to autism, or Kristine Barnett the mother and teacher who argues (convincingly) for connecting with children through their passions... more

I picked up Alys, Always off the "New Fiction" shelf at the library; I had never heard of it, it had no jacket so no summary or blurb, but I read the first paragraph and was hooked. I recommend this as the best way to approach this book: knowing absolutely nothing about it... more

Under the Dome is the sort of book that makes you suspect Stephen King has a very low opinion of homo sapiens: a small town is abruptly and inexplicably cut off from the outside world, which causes mundanely bad people to become Very Bad People Indeed... more

11/22/63 is King's take on the classic change-the-past-to-improve-the-future trope (I think Hitler and JFK are probably tied for favorite characters to kill/not kill in this scenario). To power the tension, King employs a variation of the Novikov self-consistency principle in which history actively resists being altered... more

Having finished the freelance consulting work which absorbed (sucked dry?) most of my free time for the past six months, I've fallen back into reading with a vengeance. Thus:

Caleb's Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks. Brooks just gets better and better. I started out with People of the Book and was a convert almost immediately; Year of Wonders confirmed it and by the time I got to March I'd become an evangelist. Her writing is truly luminous -- spare but every word well-chosen, and she evokes a time and place better than almost anyone I've ever read. As with People of the Book, she's taken a small historical snippet and built an intensely believable story around it. Her fiction is more real than most people's history.

Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, with everything from big-game hunters going after triceratopses to unresolvable paradoxes to an old man visiting 1950 in an attempt to find a nice Jewish boy for his daughter. Great fun, if a bit uneven (some are better than others). The Le Guin at the end was, as she always is for me, the star of the show.

All four Tiffany Aching books from Terry Pratchett. All of his books make me laugh; the best ones also make me cry. These did. His witches are the most practical, hard-headed, loving, smart, wonderful women I've ever encountered, whether they're practicing "persickology" or avoiding "the cackle", and the Nac Mac Feegles are the best anti-fairies you'll ever meet.

Dracula, My Love, a huge disappointment. Thin, boring, uneven. Skip it. If you've read Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tapes, you've read a far far better version of this already. The author tries to turn Mina into a modern woman but doesn't succeed very well -- instead of thinking for herself she's like a weathervane, swinging around to believe whoever is telling her tales at the moment, so it comes across as more of a slightly discordant medley than a coherent tune. In fact, Bram Stoker's Mina is in some ways a more consistent and stronger character than this one. There's a completely irrelevant sub-plot about Mina finding her father and mother, which doesn't even make Mina a more interesting character since it's a very cliche Victorian solution. The book was a bit of a snooze in places because James had to recount in all the events of the original book in order to tell Mina's version of them; apparently she didn't want to assume that anyone had actually read the original, which to my mind is a major flaw (what's wrong with demanding your readers come to a book with a little context??). Finally, the ending, while not bad in and of itself, was entirely wrong for the story thus far. It would have been a tolerable ending for a different version of the story, but for me it didn't fit this one well at all.

So there. Right now I'm working on A Discovery of Witches, which I was excited about until I found out it was only #1 of a trilogy. Why must everyone do trilogies? Why??? I blame it all on Allen and Unwin.

What fun this was!! The author, George Gaylord Simpson, was a noted paleontologist, and his tale of Dr Magruder (whose degrees include AChA3*, whatever that means) who falls from his research lab in 2162AD through the gap between time quanta (tiny discrete packets of time) into the late Cretaceous period, is a terrific read. My only complaint: too short! The frame, if you will, is the discovery of seven or eight stone tablets, reliably dated to 80 million years prior to the story's setting, containing Magruder's description of what happened to him and how he survived amongst T. Rex (vicious but stupid and not very agile) and other nasties of that era.

First off, I love time travel stories; the paradoxes and questions that they raise make my brain feel funny, like stretching a muscle you don't use very often. Spouse and I regularly get into an argument every time we watch "The Prisoner of Azkaban," over how Harry could survive the Dementors in order to get to the point in time where he could go back and rescue himself from the Dementors. That's the kind of thing that makes time travel a fun topic. In the second chapter the Universal Historian outlines the two universes that we all live in: the present, which has motion but not duration or growth, and the past, which has growth and duration but no motion. He compares it to the tip of a live plant: all the growth and change and movement goes on at the tip (the present), while behind it is left a static and ever-increasing "deposit" of experience, memory, etc (the past). There is no future, just as there is nothing for the plant beyond the tip of its branch.

The manuscript, which was found in Simpson's papers after his death in 1984, was probably written about 1970 but has a kind of H.G. Wells-ian flavor to it, maybe because Simpson was born in 1902 so grew up in an era more sympathetic to that style of writing. (He surely grew up reading that kind of writing!) The book starts with a question, posed by the Universal Historian, "What would you do if you knew you were going to be utterly alone for the rest of your life?" and (fittingly enough) ends with the answer to it. And no, we're not talking about the trite "If you were marooned on a desert island" question, since that presupposes a society to be marooned from and therefore the hope that someday you might be rescued; we're talking about the complete and utter nonexistence of any chance of another human being ever. What would you do? How much of what we do is based on the existence of other people? When you take away every aspect of our lives that assumes, relies on, or is meant to capitalize on, the existence of others, what's left?

I won't spoil it by giving it away, but it's an answer I like, since it fits with my own belief. And it's surely a question worth thinking about. As Tom Bombadil says, "Tell me, who are you? Alone, yourself, and nameless?"