science fiction
Right on down the line…
Wow Monday is really, really bright.
Moved Kahuna’s amp out of the closet and into my office. Looks cool and is much easier to get at when he wants to play, but the best part is now I have more room in my closet for boots!
Actually it is more like now I have room in the closet to actually put my boots inside. It isn’t that I have so many boots, it’s that everything (non-boot related) in the apartment we don’t have space for winds up in our closet. We went so many years without closets that I think we sort of view ours as a spare room, instead of the place you hang your clothes.
Credit for finding the featured vid goes to Cassie Taylor. She was tweeting the vids she was watching this morning and she shared Three Stripes on a Cadillac by her dad, Otis Taylor.
(If you pull the blog on a feed you can check out the video here)
Okay, so I found this:
Please tell me Kate is wearing thigh-high boots because that would be so awesome…
Then I died of squee overload.
- Kit
Some of the Mondays that I’ve been through…
Bleh. Did the whole ‘go have your bloodwork done or we won’t insure you any more’ thing Kahuna’s work requires every year. Forgot to tell the lab tech I can’t do latex so I came home with a rash all over my incredibly sore arm.
I have scoured the Amazon site and can’t find my pre-order for Serpent Sea by Martha Wells anywhere. Sigh. I keep thinking I saw a tweet where someone had a few signed copies left so I may go check that out and pick one up from them.
According to Google, it would take 41 hours to drive to E3 from my house.
If I were Tony Stark I would invent a device so every time I walked through a door ‘Fire‘ by Viv and the Revival would play. It would be like having my own personal theme song. People would still be humming it after I left the building. Captain America would (in a long-suffering tone) tell me to keep it off the coms during battle and that no, I could not organize a cheerleading squad and band to play the song live every time I smacked Dr Doom or a Hydra agent with a repulsor blast. Sigh…Cap never lets me have any fun.
Okay, maybe I really need another cup of coffee.
- Kit
War, children, it’s just a shot away…
Young Army nurse Mary Damico dreams the deaths of soldiers before they happen, but cannot save them. Only when she is recruited for a secret unit of other “esp talents”–one run by a rogue CIA psychiatrist who may be a “talent” himself–can she become the psychic commando she needs to be to stop the psychiatrist’s insanity and save those she loves.
While Dream Baby sits firmly in the speculative fiction genre, at its heart it is a story about war. For most people in the United States the reality of the Vietnam War was long ago replaced by the mythology. Vietnam is all gruff old men, cool tv shows and Oscar winning movies. It has been pulled apart, torn down, discussed and put back together with as much distance from the real events as possible.
Dream Baby eliminates that distance and drags the reader right into the middle of the conflict. Bruce McAllister did years of extensive research and 
interviewed hundreds of soldiers before he wrote the book. This research along with his talent for place writing combine to produce a vivid and powerful story that can often be overwhelming to read. Whether they are in the field hospital or walking down a jungle path, everywhere McAllister took the characters looked and felt like it existed. I had no trouble visualizing the characters in the jungle, on a boat or deep within a hidden cave. His images were so vivid I could not only see the jungle, I could almost feel the heat and smell the rain.
In fact, McAllister does such a good job building his world it was very difficult to distance myself from it. This war is violent, bloody and most of all unrelenting. I was with the characters in a nightmare and it often felt like I was taking the hits along with them. The worst part was I had to keep reading; once I got into the story I was hooked until the bitter end. It was worth every bruise because while Dream Baby was brutal it was also absolutely brilliant. When people say they ‘got lost in a book’ they are talking about stories like this one.
You can pick up a copy of Dream Baby on Amazon. There is a version available for Kindle and other reading devices and you can preview the first chapter online. You can also watch a trailer for the book on the Dream Baby webpage.
Dream Baby – Bruce McAllister – ISBN – 9781453880937
- Kit
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One more cup of coffee for the road…
No time today and OUT. OF. COFFEE.
From Simon Haynes over on Spacejock – SF Novelists Opening Acts: Twenty-five First Chapters from Twenty-five Writers
Every reader knows that the trouble is not finding something to read, but finding something you want to read. Sometimes, it’s something familiar, something known. Sometimes it’s something new, something unexpected. SF Novelists proudly offers you twenty-five teasers, twenty-five first chapters across the spectrum of SF and F. Twenty-five tastes, to tempt your appetite for adventure… to lure you into unknown worlds.
Ed MacLaren of Femme Metal Webzine interviews Hugo Flores and Jessica Lehto from Factory of Dreams:
Hugo:Yeah, the idea was to impress the audience from the very first track “Enter Nucleon” with an explosive and original sound. The initial synth from “Enter Nucleon” is very aggressive and then with the soaring guitars and blown up drums it’s all settled in for the ride!
Sigh…No one ever wants sushi when I do.
SHR Listening Station – sort of like Virgil radio. Listen to (almost) any release from the Suburban Home Records catalog. Very cool.
- Kit
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Far across the distance…
I have dueling spammers. I have pitted them against each other in sort of an old style wrestling cage match. Well, in my mind anyway. Ponyboy is ahead based on the sheer number of entries his little bot generates but Jackalope guy is closing in on the strength of all the cute little smileys he tosses in his spam.
It is possible I need more sleep…or coffee…or both.
I miss my little space show so so much and apologize in advance for —–
KIT’S AWESOME VID OF THE DAY – KING OF THE WORLD
Have a good weekend!
Kit-
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Cause Monday is a mess…
Kahuna was kind enough to share his cold with me and Scooter. I am drinking hot tea since coffee tastes funny. The true misery of a cold – no coffee. At least I can breathe today. The less said about the can’t breathe/coughfest of yesterday the better.
For those who know we live in North Carolina we are fine. While our city took a lot of damage with buildings destroyed, power lines down, cars stacked two and three high and pieces of roof stuck in trees, all we had on our side of town was rain and a little wind. We saw the tornado from our sunroom, but it was so big and lumpy we thought it was just a very low cloud.
I have a new article up on GamingHUD. It is a review of several Alternate Start mods for Elder Scrolls IV-Oblivion.
I was going to rant about the terrible, awful and highly sexist review of Game of Thrones by Ginia Bellafante but I just don’t have the energy for it today. However, I will say while ‘ethics’ may be old-fashioned term, if you as a reviewer cannot comprehend or simply hate a style or genre of media you have a responsibility NOT to review it.
Enough grumbling. I found this over on SF Signal. The Fine Brothers explain Doctor Who – all five decades of it.
- Kit
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I cross the void beyond the mind…
Long before Tennant or Smith…even before Davison or Baker there was Jon Pertwee.
Pertwee. P-e-r-t-w-e-e. Back in the early 1980s when PBS was airing the Tom Baker episodes my afterschool job stretched late into the night. I usually got home right as Doctor Who was going off. I also somehow missed the Peter Davison years as well. However, in the mid ’80s I did manage to stumble over the episodes with Jon Pertwee.
Pertwee played the Doctor in his third incarnation when The Time Lords had forcibly regenerated him, disabled his Tardis and exiled him to earth. These are the episodes with Unit and the Brigadier, with Liz and Jo and Sarah Jane, with the Tardis scattered in pieces all over the lab tables and floor and with the Master and his awesome beard of evil.
This is my Doctor. With his vintage car and opera cape and possibly the best hair out of all the eleven versions he remains -the Doctor- in my mind and memory.
This is an awesome video (film quality is what it is, we are lucky to have the footage at all) because it showcases just how swashbuckling the third Doctor was. Whether driving fast cars, riding fast motorcycles, swordfighting or swinging from chandeliers this was a very physical interpretation of the Doctor.
I don’t expect to convert the world but if you all get a chance check out the episodes with Pertwee. Ignore the terrible special effects and just enjoy the storyline.
- Kit
- Blurred…
February 12, 2013 | 4:06 pm
I have been trying to write the review for Blurred, by San Francisco singer/songwriter Alex Wise for a few months now but can’t seem to finish it. This is difficult for me to say but I get about halfway through the process and find myself so homesick I just can’t continue. The past few years have been full [...] - Arc & Stones…
February 11, 2013 | 4:53 am
Now that Scooter is back sleeping nights I proclaim this ’dig myself out from under the mountain of un-reviewed music‘ week. Kicking off the week o’reviewing is Arc & Stones, the debut EP from Brooklyn band Arc & Stones. The guys are Dan Pellarin (vocals), Ben Cramer (guitar), Joe Doino (drums) and Eddy Bayes (bass). I had [...] - Telegraph Taboo…
January 21, 2013 | 8:45 am
So, I was in the mood for some blues and whoosh – blues appeared. Other people get coupons, bills and news updates in the mail while I get blues music. Cool new blues music in the form of the debut release Telegraph Taboo from the Chicago-based band Nick and the Ovorols. This is not a pretty album. The vocals on a few tracks [...] -
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