Archive for December, 2007

Lost and Battlestar Galactica trailers

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Make sure you check out these trailers for the upcoming seasons of two of my favorite TV shows: Lost and Battlestar Galactica! Really looking forward to watching new episodes of these!

Upcoming books from Charles Stross

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Charles Stross has a new post on his blog with details of publications of both new books and paperback editions of earlier books here.

The last books of his I read was the excellent Glasshouse and Accelerando , and I’m looking forward to the upcoming ones! Check out his earlier works as well, for instance Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, highly recommended!

Keeping track of publications of paperback editions in general is far from easy considering the difference in both price, format, release dates etc between the UK and US. Some authors books seem to take forever to move from hardcover to softcover, other ones switches so quickly that it might be hard to get hold of the hardcover edition if you don’t keep track. I do tend to by mostly paperbacks since they are easier to store and the lower price also enables me to buy more books than I otherwise could. There are of course exceptions, either books from favorite authors (last one was The Dreaming Void by Peter Hamilton) or hardcover editions on sale.

For people who can read Swedish my favorite resource for information on new books is SF-bokhandeln and I guess there must be similar lists available in English somewhere. I’m afraid I don’t know of any good ones, but that is probably since I haven’t looked hard enough.

“Bridgehead” by David Drake

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

Bridgehead by David Drake is a reprint of a 20 year old book and the first book written by Drake that I’ve read. There might be some spoilers ahead, but considering that the title of the book itself is a bit of a spoiler it might not be a problem…

The book is a quick and easy read and I quite like the overall writing style of the author. It’s too bad that this particular story feels a bit dated. The technology descriptions are pretty decent but there are some parts at the end where it becomes very apparent that the science labs aren’t equipped with modern computers and networking. The basic storyline is that at a Professor and his grad students have built a time machine that physically transports people and objects back in time. They were told how to build by a trio that calls themselves the Travelers who claim that they come from a Utopian society 10 000 years in the future. The Travelers have come back in time to make sure that the time machine that is crucial for the development of their perfect future is invented (yes, thinking about this classic time travel paradox might make your head hurt). This is of course not quite true; as the blurb on the back of the book ominously states: “The future isn’t peaceful. The past is not the past.”.

I did enjoy the book, but on the same level as you might enjoy a mediocre movie – a nice way to spend a few hours but it will be quickly forgotten. After being spoilt by reading the works of excellent writers like Peter F Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds etc this book is simply isn’t very good. My rating is 2 out of 5 stars.

Edit: I stumbled upon Drake’s own description of the book, it was an interesting read. Check it out here.