The simpler life

On a sunny day (Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:45:45 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

If he has that many SF books, he should digitise them. or keep them as investment, if it is early copies. One harddisk can keep a lot. Store as jpg, or as text.

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Good at farce. His recent books haven't been all that imnpressive.

is probably better, though his latest book isn't all that good either.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Theodore Sturgeon was good. At the time I liked James Blish better, which doesn't say much good about my juvenile taste. Charles Sheffield is no better than OK. I read his stuff happily enough, but it is a bit crude and clunky. John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar"

was one of the all-time greats, but he'd never written anything anything like as good before he wrote it, and his attempts to duplicate the magic afterwards didn't come close, though his

was pretty good, albeit in a very different style.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I read a load of Blish, but the only one that IMO has stoof the test of time is Black Easter.

One of the best books I ever read was Catchworld, by Chris Boyce. Never seen it around for decades. ah...

One harddisk can lose a lot.

John

RAID1 (or 5 if you fancy a load of HDDs, but 1TB is enough for now). My next PC is going to have less than 200GB of SSD, and a NAS box. Right now the PC I have been using for a couple of years requires less than 100GB, excluding data. SSD will more than double its speed.

On a sunny day (Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:32:37 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

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They have republished all of Sturgeons stuff... something like 10 or

And I agree about Sheffield, not great, but adequate. Sci fi is a bit main stream these days. "The time travelers wife" and others, you can do strange things in novels and not have them relegated to the Sci Fi aisle.

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Ian Banks aka Ian M. Banks does write for both sides of the aisle. His "Transitions" was mainstream, but had definite science fiction elements.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Charles Sheffield is no longer current, alas.

But he should be on any list that includes Stross, Egan and Banks. The four of them are the only SF authors whose work I would buy automatically. He doesn't publish often, but what he does publish is always good. And I suspect he probably inspired a lot of the work of the other three.

Even that pompous ass Francois Mitterrand understood:

"A man loses touch with reality unless he is surrounded by his books."

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

And a lot of trips to the dictionary to discover the word you are looking for wasn't there? :)

The artwork is the only good thing about reissues. Lots of versions to choose from. :)

I just wish people would use a flatbed scanner instead of a cheap camera.

Prompted by this discussion I looked him up on Wikipedia.

2) He seems to write novels using emacs, some kind of text processing/markup language and what must be the original unix Revision Control System :)

Hehe, I find it funny that someone credited with writing some of the most visionary SF around - particularly with respect to the future of computation - uses tools from the 1970s. I gather Neal Stephenson, another "cutting edge" writer, does it with a fountain pen.

Wasp Factory was bizarre and fascinating

If I may... "A man loses touch with reality unless he is online."

Try to remember the last time you looked into a datasheet book.

Some time last millennium...

A couple days ago, when I tried to find data on a National Semiconductor 'MM?????' chip for someone.