Review: A Dance With Dragons

Meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy! Plenty of the usual Martin juiciness in character, interactions, schemes, and events. Brutality and suffering are well in evidence, side by side with hope and sincerity.

Alas, I start to tire of the cliff-hanger formula for each chapter. I would like to follow each story line farther, with fewer interruptions. Is this device so necessary? It's typical of a modern TV dramatic series. More than five major story lines are juggled in the air, and there are some important new characters. But their coming together is still mostly anticipated.

A Dance with Dragons left me with more questions than answers. It's a giant "coming next season!" promotional trailer.

I listened to the previous books on audio book. They are read beautifully and powerfully by Roy Dotrice, with the exception of A Feast of Crows, which is very unpleasantly read by a different narrator, and should be avoided. As audio books, they are marvelously effective, although it can be challenging without the aid of maps and appendices of characters, to remember who is who. On the other hand, a superb narrator helps one get the feeling of each character, story line and situation. There is a richness of consciousness in the voice which helps one absorb the story. Roy Dotrice is phenomenal.

Review: Game of Thrones: Season 1

 Sean Bean as Eddard Stark. Perfect in every way.

I had been looking forward avidly to this HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Well, to tell the truth, I was a bit put off by the extreme hoopla. There is such a thing as over-promotion. I'm sufficiently bored with marketing antics to not pay much attention to them. It tends to inspire disgust. Though I did think the food wagon was a nifty idea. Too bad I don't live in New York City -- I sometimes say that to myself, living out here in the cultural boondocks of Charlottesville. But, as I rarely leave the house, it matters little.

Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

The Dispossessed is a murmuring tale whose circular, interwoven structure echoes Shevek’s paradigm-shifting research into temporal physics while examining the moral consequences of two interlocked societies, one capitalist, the other communist.

The setting is the twin worlds of Urras and Anarres, each of which looms in the sky as the other’s moon; a symbolical relationship. Urras, a land of abundant resources and beauty, is the homeworld. Anarres, in contrast, is a dry, geographically dull, inhospitable place whose people work hard to survive.

Shevek is a brilliant theoretical physicist born on Anarres, which was colonized by the followers of Odo who abandoned Urras many centuries ago to found their own revolutionary anarchic society on Anarres. The reader is initially perplexed by the structure of the book, which alternates chapters form Shevek’s early life with chapters from his later life, written as if they were happening in the present time, telling parallel stories of this one man’s origins and later development. After a few such chapters the reader grasps the format and climbs happily onboard, and soon glimpses the rationale for this structure, as Shevek lays the mathematical groundwork for understanding the non-linearity of time, and thus proving the feasibility of time travel. His intellectual passion leads him toward political heresy in both Anarres, and later, Urras. Finally, he performs the first act in bringing Urras and Anarres together, collapsing their distance as his tale arrives full circle, at his simultaneous departure and arrival.

Review: The Bards of Bone Plain

Author: Patricia A. McKillip
Format: Hardcover
Page Count: 329
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: The Penguin Group
Pub. Date: Dec. 7, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0441019571
Rating: 8 out of 10

The Bards of Bone Plain is a lyrical fantasy that melds a remote, legendary past with a steam-driven modernity. The author, Patricia A. McKillip, neatly weaves an unfolding plot, populated with believable, attractive people, written with solid characterization and motivation.

Speculative Fiction Online: Short Stories

Lovers of speculative fiction — elf watchers, sorcery buffs, space nerds, zombie huggers, apocalypse prophets — fantasists and science fiction lovers of all stripes — can find plenty of fiction online to sate an appetite for shorter works at a low price, or no price at all. Short fiction is one of the best ways for new authors to be published and recognized. You can feel the thrill of discovering talented authors before they’re well known. Online publishing has lowered the cost for a writer to reach a reader, and while there is a great range of quality in the fiction available online, I think you’ll find that the sources linked below have a lot to offer the discerning reader.

The idea for this post had its genesis in my happy discovery of Torque Control’s Short Story Club, mentioned by Yet There Are Statues, Matt Hilliard’s intelligent, articulate blog of reviews of science fiction and fantasy books. Torque Control is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the journal of the British Science Fiction Association, and it has a lively, thoughtful, active following of writers and sci-fi enthusiasts who engage in respectfully pointed discussions. It’s a pity that the site design is barely adequate; I discern a limited WordPress theme that is not being used to full advantage. On the other side of the pond we have the glitzier Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, but unfortunately, for the purposes of this article, there I did not find links to free and inexpensive online writing, although I did find an interesting link to online fantasy and science fiction writing workshops at Odyssey.
The Torque Control Short Story Club selections link to a glorious plethora of online sci-fi and fantasy journals, and for the benefit of our readers here, I’d like to share these discoveries and more. Please add links in the comments to recommend additional resources, or comment on these selections.

Knife of Dreams

Knife of Dreams is much better than Winter's Heart or Crossroads of Twilight. Stuff happens in spite of Jordan’s usual foot-dragging, boring mental landscapes, and scene-killing clothing descriptions.

My favorite scene: Egwene mastering the situation as a prisoner of the Tower, converting the novices to her side, coping with the pain of punishment, drawing on her considerable inner resources, defying expectations, using her Aiel education. I thought that part of the book was especially well-paced and dramatized.

I’ve become more tolerant of Nynaeve, and more appreciative of her role as a source of amusement. Elayne, however, is an idiot, who succeeds in spite of herself. The Perrin/Faile separation was a trial in ways the author didn’t fully intend, and in the end the reader is relieved that THAT’s over. I was disappointed at the way RJ disposed of Rolan, but what would one expect from the Forsaken (e.g., Jordan.)

The buildup to Perrin's attack on the Shaido was a dreary, dull, drawn-out affair (as are most scenes.) I'm sorry, but that's not how one builds drama and tension, that's "frittering the time away and annoying the readers" or something like that.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Sanderson does in The Gathering Storm.

Shameless promo of Adonalsium.net

Stooping to brutal marketing tactics, Adonanalsium.net promises Brandon Sanderson fans that social networking promotion of Adonalsium will improve their chances to win Sanderson books. I'm happy to oblige, although I draw the line at Facebook.

Note that you do have to register for their Drupal forum in order to fill out the giveaway form.

Cool stuff: free download of Warbreaker! Kindle owners can convert this PDF to Kindle format, hooray! (Sigh... I already bought a paperback.)

It's easy to follow them on Twitter, too.

I wonder if the discussion forums are worth reading?

Altering CSS for every nth element of a class

I wanted to improve on my previous jquery fix to remove the left padding for the 4th floating div.widget on the Rabbit Software homepage. If I add more widgets, the rows won't align correctly unless I can remove the padding from every 4th one. Because of the fixed width template and fixed width of the widgets, there are always 3 widgets per row.

The index of widgets counts up from 0, so I needed to fix every child whose index is a multiple of 3.

Even floated div columns: equalHeights

When you are floating a bunch of divs inside a container, it is a design problem when the divs are of different heights depending on their content, because they tend to wrap funky. One can, by brute force, make them all the same height, but that approach is fragile and can create problems with the content contained in each div. (Why is there a flower photo? Just because it looks nice.)

A better approach would be to measure the tallest div and force that height on all the remaining divs. Alas, although there exist some CSS methods for doing this, they're not adequately cross-browser compatible, so a javascript method is the only effective approach.

I found a very nice jquery plugin called equalHeights, and implemented it in the SimpleFolio theme for rabbitsoftware. Thank you again, Filament Group, a great resource for JQuery plugins.

Rip an Audiobook CD to an IPod

I have been spending time with audiobooks lately. Managing and navigating audio book CDs, which can have up to 99 tracks per disc, can be a nightmare on the IPod unless you build playlists before syncing.

This CNet post, How to rip an audiobook CD to an iPod, was very helpful.