Pop Culture

One of the problems with a long-running series is that it accretes backstory as you go (unless, of course, you go the Rex Stout route and just pretend that time doesn't pass for the characters, even when you have the client in a later book being the son of a character from one of the earlier volumes...). This is particularly troublesome for the sort of series in which the characters become more experienced and powerful as they go along. After several books, it starts to become difficult to find credible threats for your protagonist to face. For the 13th volume of the Dresden Files, Jim…

SteelyKid's third birthday is next week, but we're going to Kate's mother's for the day itself, so we're having a birthday party today for her and her friends from day care. So, even though all the news is depressing, it's a day to be happy. So here's a happy song: (OK, I don't quite know what to make of the final bit with the flower, but the tune is relentlessly cheery, and never fails to raise a smile when it comes up on iTunes. It's the signature Friday tune of one of the DJ's on KEXP, otherwise I wouldn't ever have heard of it.)

I'm going to be talking to someone about treatments of parallel worlds in popular media next week, and as the only going mass media concern with a parallel-worlds plot seems to be the show Fringe, it would be helpful for me to be able to talk sensibly about it. Thus, two questions: 1) Where is the best place to look for an explanation of the show's mythology, particularly in the parallel worlds area? 2) Can you suggest a smallish (ideally single digits) number of episodes to watch to get the idea of how this plays out in the show? I am aware that, the Internet being what it is, there will be…

I'm not a huge Mieville fan, but the descriptions I read of Kraken sounded like good fun. As I like fun books, and a fun book written by China Mieville seemed sufficiently improbable that I just had to see it, I picked it up a little while ago, and read it over the last week or so while biking to nowhere or waiting for SteelyKid to go to sleep. The book follows the adventures of Billy Harrow, a biologist working for the Darwin Center in London, who was responsible for preserving the giant squid they have on display there. It's the pride of the collection and a big tourist draw, so when Billy…

For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he's on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy these days, so they can write better stories about astronomical objects and ideas, and reach a wider audience through fiction. This year's workshop just ended, and Brotherton has links to some of the presentations, and blogs about it from the attendees. I really like this…

Michelle Sagara's rant about convention panelist behavior reminded me that I never did get around to writing up the other panel from this year's Readercon that I wanted to say something about, namely "Why We Love Bad Writing" James D. Macdonald, Anil Menon, Resa Nelson, Eric M. Van, Harold Torger Vedeler (leader). In the Guardian, writer Edward Docx bemoaned the popularity of such writers as Stieg Larsson and insisted on a qualitative difference between "literary" and "genre" fiction. Critic Laura Miller, writing in Salon, disagreed with most of Docx's assumptions, but wondered what it is…

Dear Hollywood-- GET OUT OF MY HEAD! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!! Might suck. Might be an awesome combination of 'Evil Dead'/'Army of Darkness' and 'Sean of the Dead'. We shall see. *putsonmybadasscapejustincase*

Contrary to Jo Walton's prediction, I didn't love this book. In fact, I didn't even like it very much. Much has been made over the long wait for this latest installment in the Song of Ice and Fire series, building it up to the point where actually reading and reviewing it feels a little like being asked to review a unicorn, to lift a phrase from Chuck Klosterman. Much of the discussion leading up to this had to do with whether fans were unreasonable for complaining about the wait, and talked about whether readers had any right to make demands of authors. Sort of lost in that was the real…

A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the "they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them" vein-- it's great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores and enough hipsters to support them, but for large swaths of the country, the big-box chains were the best thing ever to happen to readers. Going from a cramped little B. Waldencrown in the local mall to a full-size Borders or Barnes and Noble store was a world-changing experience for a lot of people…

I've been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references-- quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I'm sure I've missed a few-- many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes tend to slide right over as I read (in the previous book, one section was titled "Clever Section Title Here" until distressingly late in the process)-- but for your amusement, here's what I have at the moment, in approximately the order in which they appear in the book: Star Wars The Adventures of…

This past weekend, Kate and I were at Readercon, a SF convention outside Boston. This particular con is, as the name suggests, very literary in nature, and features a lot of panels of a more academic inclination. Unfortunately, my feelings about the humanities side of academia are in the "Oh, please," phase of their oscillation, so I ended up skipping a lot of it in favor of working on edits for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. I did go to a couple of panels, though, one of them on "Book Inflation:" Tom Easton, Leigh Grossman (leader), Walter H. Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein, Howard Waldrop.…

As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer: This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing that while it is possible to learn all about politics and philosophy in thirty seconds, understanding Einstein takes three whole minutes. So, relativity is at least six times more difficult than philosophy. (This presumably explains why there are so many physicists who dabble in philosophy,…

Prompted by this and this, among other things, one of the critical questions of the modern age: Harry Potter is a: Magic is a classical phenomenon, no matter what you may have heard, so you can choose one and only one option.

Like a lot of people in SF/ Fantasy circles, I stayed up late reading last night. Unlike most of those people, though, what I was reading was not A Dance with Dragons from George R. R. Martin, but Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, the sequel to Spin and Axis, concluding a series that he said in 2007 he was "trying very hard not to think of as the Spin Cycle." Like Axis was to Spin this is a somewhat indirect sequel, and it's in a very different style than the previous volumes. Where the earlier books closely followed a small number of protagonists through a single series of events, Vortex…

(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.) It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations where the subject of writing a popular audience book on quantum physics comes up. I've had enough of these now that I can recognize a few different categories of responses, one of which drives me up the wall. I suspect that the same is true for most pop-science authors, so as a public service, let me…

A little while back, I bought The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham. Abraham is the author of the highly-regarded but not all that highly sold Long Price Quartet. I've heard nothing but good things about this, but I couldn't get through the first book, for reasons that are entirely personal and no reflection on the quality of the book(*). Since this is the start of a new and unrelated series, I figured it was a good way to give him a shot, so I picked up the ebook. A little more recently, I picked up Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, a new space opera that's gotten some good reviews. "James…

I kicked off the week with a grumpy post about the Guardian's flawed list of great non-fiction, so let's end the week with a slightly more upbeat take on the same basic idea. The New York Times did a slightly lighter list, asking their staff to pick favorite nonfiction. The lack of consensus is pretty impressive, but the list is still heavy with books that are famous-- even if you haven't read them (I mostly haven't), you'll recognize the titles. So, famous works of non-fiction are pretty well covered. Which leaves non-famous non-fiction as a decent bloggy topic. So: What are some of your…

A lot of people who rail against popular music (hipsters, classical music snobs, etc.) will cite the mere presence of one or more saxophones in a song as evidence that it sucks, as if saxophones are inherently evil. I've never really understood this attitude, and wonder how widespread it is. Thus, a poll: Saxophone solos in popular music are:Market Research (The proximate cause of this was some clueless ranting on a pseudonymous LiveJournal, and the recent death of Clarence Clemons, but it's something I've wondered about for a long while, and been keeping in reserve for a day when I needed…

Josh Rosenau has a post about the supernatural, spinning off recent posts about a recent Calamities of Nature webcomic. Josh makes a point that I think is valid but subtle: The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part of the universe, but whether it is bound by the same laws as all the other elements of the universe. The bizarre claim about ghosts is that they somehow obey some laws but not others, for no obvious reasons. Something supernatural could, in principle, interact with the universe sometimes but not at others. If it is operating outside of natural laws, that doesn't…

While I was off at DAMOP last week, the Guardian produced a list purporting to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time. Predictably, this includes a tiny set of science titles-- five in the "Science" category, two under "Environment," and one each under "Mathematics" and "Mind." And that's being kind of generous about the boundaries of science. This sort of thing is so depressingly common that it's almost hard to be outraged about it any more. Almost. Because, really, your list has room for Herodotus, but not Galileo or Newton? The modern world owes vastly more to the early…