Spin

In the absence of any particular objections I think I'll adopt the approach of appending to existing posts rather than making multiple posts each day. RJA pointed out that this might cause complications for people using RSS to read my blog, but a) I don't think anybody will be doing that in the near future and b) I don't know that I care anyway. So feel free to complain if you feel so inclined.

I'm pondering whether I should post about politics on this blog. I'm not sure that I really want to; I'm not sure that I have the energy. Plus, what exactly can you say? Bombing the crap out of a country's civilian infrastructure and killing innocent people is bad, okay?

Motivation problems at work, mostly due to excessive workload and lack of adequate staffing, with a measure of normal work stupidity (leave an improvised solution in place long enough and it becomes policy). Same as everybody else, I suppose.

My brother is moving back up to the city in a few weeks. I'm looking forward to having him around. He'll be moving out on his own for the first time (his first year of college he lived up here, but in our spare bedroom, so that doesn't really count), which has to be pretty exciting.

As I mentioned, I finished the novel Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. He's an easy writer to summarize, but to do so would not be to do his work justice. Each of his books which I've read follows an essentially similar pattern, following the life of a fairly ordinary person rubbing shoulders with fairly un-ordinary people as the pedestrian world they live in is changed fundamentally and irrevocably by huge, alien, unknowable event X. In Darwinia, on the eve of the US entry into WWI, Europe vanishes. In The Chronoliths, massive obelisks made of unknown, indestructable materials suddenly appear, engraved with messages commemorating victory in battles that haven't happened yet. In Spin, the moon and the stars suddenly vanish, sealing the Earth away from the cosmos.

Wilson writes evocative and nuanced characters, beautiful prose and plots that hook the reader, but what elevates this above good fiction and puts it in the must-read category is the sweep and power of his high concept, world-altering SF occurrances. The Spin is both something powerful and mysterious and alien and a metaphor playing throughout the lives of the books protagonists, illuminating their struggles and faults. Moreover, Wilson roots through all the consequences and implications of these world-alterning phenomena, and in Spin particularily the change opens up some fascinating avenues which he gleefully exploits.

SFW had an interview with Wilson in which he mentions that he's going to do a sequel of Spin. Most of his books don't end in a position such that a sequel is possible, but Spin positively begs for one. I'm excited.

The picture is an EA-18G, the new sparky version of the F-18F which will probably replace the US Navy's Prowlers and the USAF's EF-111s. This is great for the Navy, all they need to do is come up with an AWACS and a transport variant and their carriers can be all-Hornet, all the time.

I think I'm going to drop Eye Candy Friday and just post pictures of shiny hardware whenever I don't have a picture which pertains to my post. I'm fairly confident that I can sustain that kind of pace.