Musings of a Babylon Lurker

Hugo Reading : Short Story : “Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 | awards, books, scifi | No Comments

A story on the possibility of being preserved at death with the possibility of revival.

The combination with a “dating service” may seem a bit macabre, but the story actually works better than the other Hugo nominated short stories this year – at least for me.

This one will get my preferred vote for setting more thoughts in motion than the others.

7/10

Tags: Hugo Awards

Hugo Nominee, Short Story : “Non-Zero Probabilities” by N.K. Jemisin

Sunday, May 30th, 2010 | awards, books, scifi | No Comments

A bit of an odd story, about very improbable things happening much more often than they should – or concentrated in one place, but not in others.

This one has an unusual take on probability and superstition. I generally liked it, even if is not something exceptional.

N.K. Jemisin was another complete unknown to me, so good to see a new author.

6/10

Tags: Hugo Awards

Hugo Awards 2010 Short Story : “Spar” by Kij Johnson

Saturday, May 29th, 2010 | awards, books, scifi | No Comments

Hmmm

A short story on the theme of “Sex with an Alien”.

The whole story has one single scene , the alien is certainly non humanoid.

Unfortunately the most often asked question during reading the story was “when is it over” I found it repetitive and boring. Sorry I could not give a better review. The story must have been found good by someone, since it was nominated.

This may be an experimental story, but to me it failed.

2/10

Tags: Hugo Awards

Hugo Nominee 2010 Short Story, Mike Resnick : Bride of Frankenstein

Friday, May 28th, 2010 | awards, books, scifi | No Comments

This is a nice little story, picking up from the original Frankenstein story.

Thoughtfully made, and with a nice twist. The diary form works ok, though the title gives away a part of the plot.

6/10

Tags: Hugo Awards

Doctor Who Silurian story, Old and New

Monday, May 24th, 2010 | Doctor Who, film and tv, scifi | No Comments

Having watched the first episode of the “new Who” Silurian story, “The Hungry Earth” I decided to take a look at the very first Silurian story, I happened to have it on DVD in the “Beneath the Surface” box set.

Now, when overcoming the rather poor technical quality (thank you very much BBC for deleting the tapes) and thus the poor video quality, this is a very good story.

The memory of my early Doctor Who (before the “new series” is mainly of Jon Pertwee, and I do recall to have seen some nice stories.

Early Who mostly has a lot of running through corridors etc (well, new Who does, too), chased by monsters. While looking monster-like, the Silurians are not really that much different in attitudes from humans, making them more interesting adversaries.

This is more so true of the escalating military part of the conflict, so well commented by the Doctor.

The end is rather sad, and perhaps that is reflected in “The Hungry Earth”, seeing the Doctor’s attitude towards the Silurians.

Tags: classic Who, Doctor Who

Hugo Awards 2010 Fan Art

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 | awards, fantasy, scifi | No Comments

Finally I decided to become a “supporting member” of Worldcon2010 (Aussiecon).

This means that I have been downloading the “Hugo Voter Package” with the majority of the material nominated for the Hugo Awards. When unpacked this amounts to a whopping 700MB, including 5-6 each of Novels, Novellettes, Novellas and Short Stories, as well as a fair bit of Fan and pro magazines, fan and pro artworks.

Last year I started out with reading the novels ( the short stories had already been listened to as podcasts ) and I think that was somewhat of a mistake, since I never got to anything shorter than the novels (apart from the short stories) before the time to vote had come.

This year the plan is to go the opposite way, so I started looking at the:

Fan Artist category in the package :

Brad W. Foster,
David Howell,
Steve Stiles and
Taral Wayne

All were nominated for graphics art in different styles, except David Howell who designed the base for the 2009 Hugo award.

David Howell will be my choice of Fan Artist for the Hugo Awards 2010. I like the design a lot and I think he deserves to be recognized for the work he did.

Will I be disappointed if someone else wins ? Not at all, this just reflects my preference.

Tags: fantasy, Hugo Awards, scifi

DanCon 2010

Sunday, May 9th, 2010 | cons, scifi | No Comments

Today I went to a small scifi convention in Copenhagen.

The DanCon is a one day convention with a single thread, all going on i one room. It is organised by one of the Danish Science fiction societies, Science Fiction Cirklen. Everything was going on in Danish.

The con opened with a very nice panel discussion on “Tendencies English language short stories”, with a few examples of authors old and new.

After lunch we had a very nice presentation on medical science of the future, seen in the light of Star Trek technology, quite entertaining with a few examples illustrating how far we have already come and where we are behind the ST tech. An interesting fact is that the “hypospray” of ST had already been invented and tested some years before the original series aired.

The rest of the afternoon we had a presentation of the older British comic strip “Dan Dare”, a presentation of Anime

The afternoon ended with a presentation of the classic scifi magazine Astounding (before Campbell), an interesting insight into the scifi of the 30′s.

I found that I might have a subject for a presentation on a following con, so I am afraid I may have some work to do until then.

All in all a very enjoyable day meeting scifi friends in Denmark.

Tags: events, short story, star trek

Brief review : “Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog”

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | awards, film and tv, funny, scifi | No Comments

A web story by Joss Whedon.

After having heard most people rave about this little show I finally got the DVD and watched the thing.

The beginning is quite funny, but for me the fun wears off quite quickly. I find it too repetitive and to me that gets boring. I probably have heard too much hype about how hilarious this is.

I have no problem with the production as such, and it probably deserved winning in its Hugo category.

It just did not bring much *to me*.

Sorry about that, guys. Don’t let this take away any of your enjoyment of the show.

6/10 on the Lurker’s scale

Tags: Dr. Horrible, Hugo Awards, scifi

Review : Doctor Who : ‘Silence in the Library’/'Forest of the Dead’

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 | Doctor Who, awards, film and tv, reviews, scifi | No Comments

From the beginning of the first new season I have always loved the episodes written by Steven Moffat, from ‘The Empty Child’/'The Doctor Dances’ over ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ and the brilliant ‘Blink’ to this double episode. I am looking forward to see what he will bring to the series as show runner.

Like the other stories (when they were written) this story stands a bit by itself in the Doctor Who time line.

We find The Doctor and Donna arriving (in the 51th century) at a planet full of books. In essence it is a library of all known books, known just as The Library. Something is very wrong, since the library seems completely empty. Well, there are the books, but no people at all, just a cryptic computerized warning message ‘Count the Shadows !’ .

Another party arrives, with among others, a certain professor River Song who appears to have a past with The Doctor, in his future. It turns out she even knows the name of The Doctor, something unheard of in the series until now, of course not counting The Doctor posing as John Smith, clearly an alias.

The “monster” of this story is the invisible, but very deadly Vashta Nerada, residing in the shadows and being a kind of “piranhas of darkness”.

In the story we learn enough to know why the Vashta Nerada act like they do, and of course The Doctor, aided by professor Song saves the vast majority of the people trapped on the planet.

The Little girl, living an imaginary life, does raise the questions of “what is reality” when Doctor Moon tells her that the life she thinks of as her own is not real .

For me the story has the best of the elements creating a good Who adventure, a good “monster”, a mystery or two, some good characters accompanying the Doctor, etc.

This was my first choice in the category for the Hugo Awards 2009. ‘Dr Horrible’ won that one, and that is fine.

‘Spoilers !!’ (River Song)

9/10 on the Lurker’s scale

Tags: Doctor Who, film, Hugo Awards, scifi

B5 Quote “Mars ……”

Sunday, December 20th, 2009 | Babylon 5, film and tv, mythology, scifi | No Comments

One of my favourite quotes from Babylon 5 comes from the ISN news item where President Clark has declared Martial Law and the Mars colony does not follow suit.

“Mars has rejected Martial Law”

It has always amused me in the midst of all the seriousness of the situation, if you do not know why – think of what is the origin of the term Martial Law.

It refers to the Roman God of War – yes Mars, Martial, so it becomes a sort of a contradictory sentence.

Tags: Babylon 5