–4 and heavily overcast here in Iowa. I could see a smudge of lighter colored clouds but that was it. *sigh* I guess I’ll be trying again in 2010.

In response to Shaky Eclipse by John Scalzi.

© Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

A while ago I finally broke down and started trying to recoup some of the costs from my online addictions. Which is to say, I started accepting ads on my blog. This is only relevant because this month is the first month I got paid for those ads. I’ve been wondering what to spend this vast fortune of $3.06 on when I read this post. Money sent! :D

Money sent! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Tonight, John Scalzi made a stop at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, IA for his book tour to promote The Last Colony. Michelle & I got there wicked early¹ and chatted with a couple of store employees briefly. Fortunately, they were cool with me bringing in my own copy of The Android’s Dream to get it signed. *whew*

Then while we were looking around the shelves near the area for the reading, they said we could go ahead and purchase a copy of The Last Colony while we were waiting so we wouldn’t have to wait in line later. Schweet. Then I noticed they had copies of The Sagan Diary. I was most pleased by this as I was a bit strapped for cash when the pre-orders were announced for it on Mr. Scalzi’s blog and I’d heard the complete print run had sold out. Naturally, I grabbed one of the 3 copies they had left. :D Then we went into the coffee shop³ and grabbed a drink. I had their cafe mocha, while Michelle had a brewed butterscotch toffee coffee, which she promptly ruined by using soy milk for a creamer and adding sugar to it. Then we went back over to the reading area and found Mr. Scalzi had arrived. He was chatting with the few members of the audience⁴ and with the various members of the staff.
As Mr. Scalzi’s visit happened to be part of the Live from Prairie Lights. This is a local radio program that is recorded live and then later played back on a local radio station, as well as the UofI’s school/public access TV channel. So he also spent some time talking to the host of the program prepping for the show.

Then just before the show began, he addressed the audience letting us know he’d start off by reading the first chapter of The Last Colony, go into a Q&A session and then he’d be happy to pose for photos. Naturally, that’s when I decided to snap a quick shot. Heh. I also took a couple of photos later, but they weren’t as amusing as this one so they’ll remain offline for now. The reading and Q&A were quite fun to listen to. Not being a writer, I didn’t join in and ask any questions (plus my caffeine buzz was wearing off). After the recording was over, Mr. Scalzi kindly offered to sign any books people had. I quickly stepped into line with my brand-new copy of The Last Colony — specifically purchased at Prairie Lights this very evening to support them, since they brought Mr. Scalzi in for us — and my slightly dog-earred copy of The Android’s Dream.

Side note: Yes, I realize this entry is rather disjumbled. This is partly explained by me having a caffeine-crash headache, partly by me staying up till 1AMish to write it and partly by me just not being a writer.
Side note 2: The quickie post following this will explain part of why the heck I’m still up writing this.

¹ Mostly due to somebody’s lead foot².
² Said lead foot was not a Men’s size 13.
³ In his opinion on coffee, Mr. Scalzi is quite wrong. Coffee (especially good coffee) does not taste like ass.
⁴ Around this time, Michelle mentioned to him The Android’s Dream was her favorite book and he said it was his as well.

Squeeee! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I couldn’t resist joining in on all the fun, helping to promote Mr. Scalzi’s write-in bid to become the SFWA president. My apologize to Grant Wood for bastardizing his painting but it made for a good joke (I hope). This poster was created entirely in GIMP and uses a Creative Commons licensed picture of Mr. Scalzi that I found on Flickr.

I should probably give you a bit of background, as not all of my readers necessarily read Mr. Scalzi’s blog on a daily basis. On 15 March 2007, Mr. Scalzi received his ballot for this years SFWA elections. After looking it over, he decided he had some problems with it and posted a note on his blog that he was now a write-in candidate. The next day he posted some promotional images/posters made for him by various fans. A couple of days passed and still he kept talking about this whole SFWA election. Naturally, this kept the fans pouring in with comments and additional images. Finally I could resist the siren’s lure no more and created the image you see here.

Update: For the closest thing to an explanation of the bacon on a cat thing, you’ll need to read this post over at the Whatever.

Scalzi for SFWA President © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi
My Rating: 5 out of 5.

This book is a delightfully wacky tale of one man’s fight to keep a very special sheep alive. In the process, our hero will have to fight off various aliens and a few treacherous villainous humans. Scattered throughout The Android’s Dream are numerous one liners. Each one of these taken by itself and outside the context of the story are funny, but put together and in context they’re hysterical. LOL is a common abbreviation used online that stands for “Laugh Out Loud”. These days it is mostly used to indicate somebody found something else amusing and does not actually mean any truly laughed outside of their own head. I bring this up as I repeatedly found myself laughing out loud while reading The Android’s Dream. Below are a few of my favorite lines from the book:

Jesus, forgive me, he thought. I really shouldn’t have eaten that panda.

“No more shoes in advance for anyone,” he said.

“Today people have tried to kill me, the police are looking for me, and I’ve just discovered every Easter of my childhood, I ate one of my relatives with mint jelly. I’m just fine.”

“I don’t know … You’d have to ask the sheep.”

It drives physicists mad and every few years on e will snap and begin raving that sentient beings should nae fuck with that which they ken nae unnderstan’

If my little review here fails to entirely convince you to rush out and find a copy of this book to read, then try Bookgasm’s review

Review: The Android’s Dream © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Why aren’t people asking the marriage bigots flat out what they have against marriage? Against married couples? And by what right are they able to say that couples who are already legally married should have their marriages declared null and void? This proposed amendment breaks up marriages. God damn it, people should be hollering this at the top their lungs every time one of those marriage bigots gets all sanctimonious about what marriage means. People ought to be getting these marriage bigots into a corner and getting them to admit that they need to destroy legal, loving marriages in order to accomplish their goals. We ought to be getting these marriage bigots admitting that they have to strip away rights these Americans already have to do what they want to do.

I highly recommend you read Mr. Scalzi’s post in full.

Update: The comment thread on Mr. Scalzi’s post is rather long. I hadn’t completed reading it yet, when I posted this article. Heck, I’m still working my way through it. However the reason for this update is one of Mr. Scalzi’s replies to a comment was so dead on that I simply must quote him again.

As I’ve said a number of times in the past, the most “activist” judicial ruling I can think of in recent times was Bush v. Gore, and I think it was wildly poorly decided. However, you don’t see me hopping up and down like a frog on a plate, bitching about that damned activist Judge Scalia, because in my opinion, regardless of whether I like the ruling or not, the judiciary was doing its proper role. So, basically, if I have to live with a piece of crap ruling like Bush v. Gore, my sympathy for boo-hoo conservates bitching about “activist judges” is around about zero.

Bigots and Marriage © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Old Man’s War
My rating: 5 out of 5.

For a while now I’ve been despairing of finding new science fiction authors I like. I would go through my local bookstores and the only ones that didn’t seem like pure twaddle were either books I’ve read previously or by authors I was previously familiar with. Authors who usually are very old or already dead. Oddly this problem only seemed to be happening with science fiction. Fantasy, horror, mystery and so on all are fine right now. I just haven’t for the longest time been able to find any decent science fiction by an author who wasn’t all corpsified (or close to being so). This has concerned me as I misspent much of my youth blasting around the universe on the dread rocketship Imagination fueled by the works of many fine authors. I wish to continue to doing so, but the fifth or fifty-fifth time you read a book it does not always generate as much juice as the first time.

All that being said, I am pleased to say I have found a new science fiction author who writes something worth reading! A while back, I was reading Doug Stewart’s blog and he mentioned getting a particular book for his birthday. Interestingly enough the author of Old Man’s War, John Scalzi, stopped by Doug’s blog and wished him a happy birthday. I thought that was pretty cool of him. Given that Doug described the book as a gift that should “warm any decent sci-fi fan’s hardened heart”; my interest in this book was peaked.

I followed the link from the author’s comment to his website and noticed he had a free, sample chapter of the book online. I read through the sample and quite enjoyed it, so I added the book to my list¹. A few weeks later, the wife and I stopped in a Barnes & Noble to rest our weary feet and grab a coffee from their café. Before we went into the café, we looked around the store for some reading material. I still remembered wanting a better look at Old Man’s War, so I hunted around and found a copy of it. I thought the plan was to simply browse through the material while having our coffee but I was overruled and she bought the book with the coffees. As we sat down, I started to flip through the book but she wanted to look at it. Since she hadn’t found anything to look at and I actually had several books at home I was in the middle of; I let her have it. That turned out to be something of a mistake on my part, as I didn’t get it back until she finished it the next day. Since I didn’t get it back right away, I stuck it into my stack of books to read. I held off a couple of days before I broke down and yanked it out of the middle of my stack. I read it cover to cover in a single evening and loved it. I just read it again (since I’ve been home sick for a week) and still loved it. But enough about me, you probably want to know something about the book other than I loved it.

Right, Old Man’s War is set in the future. How far in the future is not explicitly stated but it seems to be the not-too-entirely-distant future. In this future, humanity is living and fighting amoung the stars. It turns out while there are numerous stars & planets out there; only so many of them are of any use to us and to the other races we’ve met. That’s right, there is alien life out there and it ain’t friendly. Human space is protected by the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) which boasts the oldest army ver fielded by man. The CDF’s infantry is entirely made up of the elderly. People, like the main character (John Perry), cannot even join the CDF until they turn 75. The elderly are joining up in droves because they all know the CDF must have someway to make them young again. After all at 75 years on Earth, humans are not exactly in the ideal condition for fighting a war.

The book starts with Mr. Perry visiting his wife’s grave and then joining the army. From there it’s a fast sprint through the rest of the story. Mr. Scalzi’s writing is easy to read, in part because he does not bog you down with tons of details about the new technologies used in the future. Also the characters are very likable and easy to relate to. But the book is not without its flaws.

The CDF is an independent entity from Earth and has more power than any goverment on Earth, but there’s nothing in the book telling us how this came about. Mr. Scalzi hints at it saying that the CDF isolated Earth from the rest of space² and then used technologies it developed or stole from other races to maintain its monoply on humanity’s spaceflight. The actual details of how the CDF managed the initial isolation and how they continue to keep Earth from building more skip drives³ and sneaking off planet. Also the plot covering John Perry’s rescue by the Special Forces and subsequent interactions with his rescuers seems.… a bit too deus ex machina. Mind you it was fun to read but it stretches the believability more than just a little and no I won’t tell you exactly why as that would require me to reveal big spoilers of the plot. Hopefully some of this will be cleared up in the sequel, The Ghost Brigades (due out next week according to Amazon.com).

¹ The list of books in my head that I need to buy when I have the money and am in a bookshop. It fluctuates depending on how good my memory is, how empty my wallet is, how often I’m visiting any given bookshop and how big an impression a book or an author makes on me.
² Due to an outbreak of an alien disease that sterialized all but 1/3 of Earth’s men.
³ The skip drive is the FTL drive in Mr. Scalzi’s universe.

Review: Old Man’s War © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.