Oolite Bulletins

He certainly enjoys skipping around the genres ... his latest novel, Transition, although ostensibly "mainstream" and published over here under "Iain Banks", is so sci-fi that his US publishers have brought it out as an "Iain M Banks" title. But as a wise man once said,

Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

If you like The Bridge, you could try Lanark by Alasdair Gray – it had a huge influence on Banks's work, and The Bridge was in large part a response to that novel.

Anyway, a question: why do people in Michael Swanwick's excellent Vacuum Flowers paint their faces?

Disembodied wrote:

Anyway, a question:

Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.

I know this one - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detecive Agency.

snork wrote:

I know this one - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detecive Agency.

Anyway, no attempts made yet for why people in the Vacuum Flowers universe use face-paint ... has nobody else read it? If not, you really should, if you can get hold of it.

See if someone can work it out: the book was, I think, one of the first SF books to use the term "wetware" ...

This is one of the ebooks I have on my hard drive queued to read (AFTER I read Drew's book!!!) so I just had a quick skim of the first chapter to see if it revealed anything.

And it does!

The "wetware paint" is an analogue of clothing and can confer identification and status amongst other things and it's called "programming". Everything from name to current medical or social status seems to be "paintable"!

is that close enough?

Close enough, yes! Selezen takes the points. The paint itself is just paint, but in a society where people put personalities, encoded on "wetware wafers", on and off like clothes – some for fashion, some for work – it's polite, as much as anything else, to paint your face in a certain way to represent what persona you're currently running: doctor, pierrot, rude boy, samurai, etc. etc.

Yay me!

OK, some thing a little more obscure, hopefully, since all my questions are usually quite easy.

It's a film. In it, a pair of outlaw aliens, exiled to Earth 500 years ago, are hunted by their homeworld's evil overlord and his minions. One of the aliens, now an old man, is rejuvenated by the arrival of these hunters and the other is brought back to life after being dead for 400 years. Together they must battle for their freedom!!

Name the film.

My memory of the film is blurred, not to say repressed ... but could this be the disastrous sequel that was Highlander II?

Disembodied wrote:

My memory of the film is blurred, not to say repressed ... but could this be the disastrous sequel that was Highlander II?

He must mean Highlander II. The movie that for me holds a personal record of being the absolutely worst sequel ever to a rather good first part.

Darn, and I thought that description would make it a bit obscure!

Yeah, it's the absolutely abysmal Highlander II - well done Disembodied. I thought it was a little more obscure because it was a sequel to a film that was NOT a sci-fi film in the classic sense...

H2 was absolutely grim to watch. It was like someone wanted to make a Bladerunner clone but put the immortals in it. Apparently the director made a couple of director's cuts and managed to salvage some of his original ideas (yes, Executive Meddling strikes again) and actually patched together a decent film that didn't make the whole thing about aliens. And a planetary Toupee!

Still, it's apparently one of the only films to get a 0% rotten rating on that Rotten Tomatoes aggregator site.

Now for another three week wait for a question I can answer... must find obscure things...

Hurrah! Me again.

Right, I'm going to go for something that's probably really unfair, but what the hey. Name the book:

Like many SF novels, this one uses the strange and the alien to pass comment on contemporary society. A traveller recounts a series of voyages into the unknown, where he encounters numerous humanoid races. He also runs into other human societies, too, including one which uses weird and wonderful technologies, and another which has discovered immortality. On his final voyage he meets a highly intelligent non-humanoid species, but is forced to leave when they learn that he's a member of the human race.

It could almost be 'Gulliver's Travels'.

El Viejo wrote:

It could almost be 'Gulliver's Travels'.

Could be, and is! Despite a slight hesitation El Viejo nods one in off the inside of the post ...

A very good novel, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. I think that’s where the term ‘Yahoo’ originates (a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of savages, the Yahoos).

Next question:

The Earth has been ruined by wars over resources… only loose groupings of isolated farming communities remain. Scientists, thought to be to responsible for the misery, are hunted down and executed. Hiding in the hills, an astronomer secretly listens to his makeshift radio telescope and after seventeen years, detects coded signals coming from the direction of Cassiopeia…

Which author and novel?

The Cassiopeia Affair by Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown.

No.