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Posted on 12/01/2006 12:55:15 PM PST by ecurbh
Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is anoble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain.
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
He's got some good books! Like Lil'Freeper said, "The Postman", which is a really great post apocalyptic novel. And he wrote one with Gregory Benford... I think it was called "Heart of the Comet", it was very good.
There ya go. And Ramius...read it again. It's fun :)
You're most welcome! ;)
"Last Men and First" and "The Starmaker". They were in an omnibus. Very far-flung and epic. No real characters, just big sweeping trends. Like a history textbook, sort of.
Supposedly The Idiotocracy or something like is a pretty good movie.
Yeah but it wasn't much like the book. And I sort of liked the movie. I'm a sucker for postapocalyptic futures.... what can I say...
Yep, from what I've read about him, those two are his best known works.
Yup. The classics. I like science fiction as much for its view of what the past was, as what the future could be. The glorious adventures of the 50s... the 'realistic' sixties and weird seventies... the depressing, psychological 80s and the new, close frontier 90s. Not sure what the defining theme of this decade will be. Seems to be a lot of blue-collar science fiction and way too much drivelling fantasy. I love fantasy, don't get me wrong, but nobody does it right.
Whoa! Those are gorgeous!
Me neither.
Looks like we don't have any Isaac Asimovs yet.
Everything else...Shannara, Xanth, Amber...seemed to be either trying too hard to imitate LotR (and getting it wrong) or going off into some other realm where I would not follow. I quit trying after college.
Amber, I like. Most of the rest.... comic fantasy, now, I like that. Not Piers Anthony, he's lousy, but Terry Pratchett is a genius. Well, he's British, what do you expect.
Tad Williams is a good fantasist though my favorite of his works, the Otherland series, is science fiction. But SF with fantasy overtones and borrowings.
I'm guessing it'll be along the lines of "post-humanism" ie, downloading the human consciousness into a variety of objects. I read a "Best of" compilation of short stories and this was a recurring theme. One was the ruminations of someone who had downloaded himself into a couch and was contempling 'what next.' Another had a character who was just back from being downloaded into a flock of seagulls. Strange.
I liked Williams' "Fritti Tailchaser."... but then I was a kid... who liked cats.
I've been hoping for a resurgence in unapologetic space opera. Well, Lois McMaster Bujold does it (or did it; she seems to be trying to not write any more Miles Vorkosigan novels, grrr) and David Weber does though I don't like his stuff... but the genre is one of my favorites. I'm not a fan of arty SF. Give me a rip-roaring tale of asteroid miners or space pirates any day.
Yup, that was a sweet story. Sort of "Watership Down" with cats.
I nearly cried three times reading Otherland, though, and for me that's saying a lot. The fourth book, when it came out, was 900 pages; I had to sit in the bookstore for eight hours to read the first 700 pages (I had no money) to make sure that my favorite character wasn't really-truly dead.
I got through the first two but then lost track of the series. Same can be said of Brin's "Uplift" series, which was also very good. Kind of operatic.
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