Oolite Bulletins

Some notes from the author's short talk on world-building in science fiction and fantasy:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/world_building/

Good stuff!

Rarely: Stories in which humanity does not appear at all (or is explicitly extinct)
Very hard to write—readers want a viewpoint to empathize with

It's hard for an author to instill empathy for a non-human viewpoint
Furry animals are easier (e.g. "Watership Down")

<chortles>

I wandered into my local library recently (first visit since it relocated into a shiny new glass and metal building where librarians are an endangered species) and picked up a copy of Singularity Sky, thinking to re-read it. Unfortunately, the typeface (?) was a trifle odd, and my old eyes couldn't adapt.

Cody wrote:

I wandered into my local library recently (first visit since it relocated into a shiny new glass and metal building where librarians are an endangered species) and picked up a copy of Singularity Sky, thinking to re-read it. Unfortunately, the typeface (?) was a trifle odd, and my old eyes couldn't adapt.

A shame ... must be a new edition: the old Orbit A-format paperback is fine. There's a tendency these days for some publishers to get overly fancy with the print editions (and I'd just like to say how much I dislike the recent trend for Th ligatures: yuk). I enjoy James Blaylock's steampunk stuff, but the publishers insist on printing it in brown ink, instead of black, which is just ...

It all feeds into my theory about publishers making typesetters go freelance, back in the 1990s: now the older generation are retiring, and because they were working for themselves they haven't trained up any replacements. So the new typesetters are people who've (sort of) figured out how to use the software, but not how to actually set type. (This will be one of my favourite topics in the retirement home.)

Disembodied wrote:

This will be one of my favourite topics in the retirement home.

I'm sure the other residents will be well pleased.

Back to my local library: chatting with one librarian, I discovered that they are not happy - and many have lost their jobs to automation. <spits>
I also note that subscription libraries are having something of a renaissance in some towns - cool if one can afford it, I suppose.

Back to Stross: are The Laundry Files a good read? El Reg has piqued my curiosity.

Cody wrote:

Back to Stross: are The Laundry Files a good read? El Reg has piqued my curiosity.

I enjoy them, yes. They draw heavily on H. P. Lovecraft, although with a hefty side-portion of humour (the stories are I think a spin-off from an earlier short story he wrote, "A Colder War", which is not funny, nor is it part of The Laundry Files, although it is very, very good, placing the Cthulhu mythos into a modern age of spies and superpower paranoia).

I bought the first book, The Atrocity Archives, on the strength of a line of blurb on the cover (of the American edition): "Saving the world is Bob Howard's job. There are a surprising number of meetings involved." It's a pretty good summary of the sort of humour in the books, which jam together the different perils of cosmic horror, spying, and office bureaucracy.

Thanks for linking A Colder War - interesting stuff. I was never into Lovecraft, I must admit.

Lovecraft's prose style can be hard work, but the ideas - the scale - he worked with are what give it its force, I think. And his influence on a host of later writers runs deep.

You may also enjoy Charles Stross on What Scared H. P. Lovecraft?. The Afterword to The Atrocity Archives is interesting, too: Stross pitches the argument that Cold War spy fiction - especially the Len Deighton Ipcress File stuff and its ilk - is a good matchup for cosmic horror, with both based around the ideas of secret knowledge and humanity teetering on the brink of unimaginable, instantaneous destruction.

I like Deighton's work - Winter is a really good read. Bomber and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse are also excellent.

I'm one of Charlie's beta readers, so I'm currently two books ahead. The next Laundry novel is a LOT of fun, featuring REDACTED and REDACTED, as well as the return of the Kettenkrad and other fun stuff. That leads directly into another very nasty situation which in his own words "opens with Bob being grilled live on Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman and goes rapidly downhill from there."

For his recent overview of the Laundry series see here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... es-ti.html

As someone who doesn't buy ebooks, and who objects to buying hardbacks, I'm still bouncing up and down in anticipation waiting for The Annihilation Score to come out in paperback (June 9 ...).