I never know how to deal with things like this, hence the rambly title

Last night, my old house was on the news.

Tangentally.

Across the road from us lived an older couple; he was retired and not in the best of health, but he - let's call him Fred - had an interest in reading and was generally a very genial man. My soon-to-be- Ex and I had dinner with them, chatted often. Fred's wife is a nurse, so we never saw much of her.

Last night, their house burned down. Fred was inside it at the time.

The house is just gone and the local news said that the Fire Department were suspicious about the cause of the blaze, the severity of it.

Fred, and I've changed his name because no one who reads this could possibly know him and I don't want the family to find this on Google somewhere, was a nice guy. He read a lot, he chatted endlessly but well, he had a lot to share. He was a good neighbor. I have missed him, in small ways, since I moved out.

My thoughts are, of course, with his wife; she has lost more than I can comprehend and I wish there was something I could do, something meaningful, that would help. Blogging seems so empty and futile, but, I think it needs saying: he was a good man, a good neighbor and I shall miss him.

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Teach Me 'ow To Be King?

According to this it seems that NBC are planning to show Merlin, the BBC Merlin, in a primetime-ish slot.

This could be interesting. I wonder if the suits have seen it, or whether they are hoping it will turn out to be a bit Harry Potter, rather than a bit homoerotic.

I still haven't seen it, so the homoerotic comments stem from the comments of people who have. Either way, it's nice to see the Yanks catching on to "just show the Brit version!", so perhaps Life on Mars didn't die for nothing.

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Retrospectively speaking

There's a lot to catch up on, I'm sure.

Firstly, I has New Blog called "Jingoistic Claptrap" which I will post stuff on from time to time that don't belong here. It will be of a fictional and possibly even satirical nature.

Second, having decided to take a break from a few sites and recover my enthusiasm, it turns out that I don't miss most of them. I'm a little bit worried about that. If I retreat any further into my shell, I will end up being all shell.

Thirdly, I still don't have anything interesting to say.

Which isn't strictly true. The looming divorce isn't as looming as it was due to a shortfall in finance - divorce being costly - but is still on course for this year. I want out, just to get it over with and be able to move on. It won't be pleasant to be a statistic, being one of the 50%, but I can live with it. I've been a statistic all my life. I'll continue to be one after I'm dead, somewhere, which is an odd sort of immortality.

I haven't written anything worth reading in far too long, which is really ticking me off. But starting 16th March I have a week off and have decided to see if I can't re-fire the creative bits by actually finishing that Time War stuff, and one or two other things I had in the works.

I'm reasonably enthused about that. As much as I am enthused about anything at the moment.

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I Think I Might Be Evil.

Only "might", because having seen the opportunity to do something potentially very evil I restrained myself.

One of the blogs I follow is currently displaying a post from a self-admittedly germophobe complaining about the preponderance of colds and the like.

Seeing this, the first thing that occurred to me was "I could sabotage this poor fool by telling him all about his keyboard". The thing about keyboards is that even if you take reasonable care to keep them clean, they still collect all the Yuck that positively sleets off the human body. And then Things grow in it. Terrible, infectious things that then plaster themselves to your skin just waiting for the slightest nick, the merest puncture, to facilitate their invasion and your transformation into a mass of suppurating agony.

Being part Shoggoth* I'm largely immune to human diseases, so the subject is one that provides much entertainment for me. A more evil chuckle still would have arisen from well meaning but deliberately misleading advice on the art of cleaning and disinfecting a keyboard. There are cleaning products available that will devour the average keyboard, leaving the poor blogger with a clean but non-functional input device and no way to express his or her rage.

I didn't, though.

For Good to triumph all that is required is for Evil men to feel a bit "meh".






*it's complicated, and you shouldn't ask because the answers will blast your sanity. It should be enough that you remember my middle names are "Squamous" and "Rugose". This is also why people sometimes think I'm Irish.

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Mr. Ebert, what have you done?

Roger Ebert is a greatly respected movie critic, an erudite chap and, more to the point, a good read.

He transgressed one of the Laws of the Internet recently. Thou Shalt Not Mock The Nerds is a good rule to operate by when online - not that you have anything to fear, but if you Mock then you can expect to have your inbox slowly fill up with hate-spam. There is no rage like nerd-rage.

Mr. Ebert has contributed to the stereotyping of a section of society that he feels are lacking.
The belittling of a social group because of a choice of self identification is wrong. If the group he were talking down to had made public their sexual, gender, ethnic or religious identity, we'd be looking at a lawsuit. Not from the individual, but surely a pressure group would have stepped in by now.

Ebert feels safe because fandom doesn't have teeth. IGetting fans to agree on anything is like nailing jelly to a ceiling.

If I were feeling spikey, I would suggest that writing a deft, pithy, entertaining review isn't a license to Other people.

Which is what he's attempted to do.

Suggesting that fans are in a cultural "dead end", that their Otaku collection and mastery of trivia, and their social ineptness makes them lesser. No one has to worry about offending them, they have no pride, they have no lives and to stand up to answer back is to invite ridicule. As long as everyone is reasonably sure it's not a variant of Autism.

He says that being a Fan these days is more about celebrating yourself, and that fans talk in quotes.

When Fandom talks in scripts, talks in quotes, what's really happening? Ebert talks about not having to ad-lib, but how much human conversation is ad-lib anyway?

Not much.

Think about the conversations you've had today. When we meet an acquaintance, what happens? We ask how that person is. If you're interested in Hacking the language when someone asks you how you are, tell them. Go for it. They probably didn't want to know about your incipient cold or the state of your love life - and oh god, the looks you get when you do enumerate the things that are wrong with you. You strayed from the path and now the conversation is deep in bandit country.

Conversation is a dying art, we're told, but it's really important to know who you're talking to and what it's safe to talk about so that you keep that vital social acceptance. It's built into Americans in High School, I imagine the same thing happens in other cultures at roughly the same time - as you construct your identity during your teens you also set patterns that will follow you for the rest of your life, patterns that are comfortable and safe, patterns that allow you to ask the question "are you like me?" of everyone you meet. If you want to call it tribal, or clannish, you can.

So why is it bad?

It's not. It's low tech RFID, social GPS. The main reason that Roger doesn't like 'em is that he doesn't like the source. If you can weave Kipling, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Russell, Marx (Karl and Groucho alike) into conversation you're Educated. You might even be Urbane and Witty. But dropping Lucas, Roddenberry, Spielberg, Snyder, Davies or Moffat, Moore or Whedon into a conversation makes you a hopeless fanboy, one of the Morlocks.

I have the distinct impression that this isn't going to change. A prejudice is hard to shake off, and by the time the works of people like Alan Moore are being spoken of in the same context as Wells and Verne, Roger Ebert and I will probably be long dead.

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Author! Author!

Mand suggested that a post of author recommendations might be a good idea. So here's a non-exhaustive list in no particular order.

• China Mieville. Start with King Rat and work your way into Perdido Street Station. It's fantasy-steampunkishness for grown-ups.
• Jon Courtney Grimwood has done some fascinating sci-fi, some alternate history world building, and is well worth a look. My own favourites include Remix and Red Robe.
• Robert Rankin is the master of Far Fetched Fiction, a man who has turned an evening in a pub with your esoteric mates into a collection of novels. He deserves a lot more attention. And money.
• Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War which is a Must Read, one of those rare books that everyone should read regardless of whether you like science fiction. It's a superb example of a really human story in a scifi setting that uses the genre to excellent effect whilst never really betraying the human elements of the story. The rest of his work is equally interesting.
• Robert A. Heinlein seems, in many of his novels, to be an arch conservative. But over the years I have come to appreciate him as a teacher. I often get the impression that he wrote books that said "here's my idea, now argue against me". Particularly important are Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, which use science fiction as a way to make points about the responsibilities of citizenship and the ways in which we treat relationships.
• John Sladek wrote some of the darkest, funniest novels I have ever read. Humour does not come blacker, or more twisted, and he was a very under-rated author. If you can find Tik Tok buy it, read it, enjoy it, then collect the rest of whatever you can find in print. He'd been dead since 2000, so it's really a race against time to grab what you can before it all goes out of print.
• Tom Holt is another great British comic-novelist, but once you've sampled something like Flying Dutch go on to read Olympiad and his earlier, serious works. Tom Holt is also One Of The Good Guys.
• Jasper Fforde is another of Britain's crop of humourists, but one bursting with strange and entertaining ideas. His books come with DVD extras, which you can find on the website.
  
• David Gemmell was a fantasy author, an excellent spinner of tales, and wrote some of the best heroic fantasy since Tolkein. Read Legend and tell me I'm wrong.
  
• Thomas M. Disch was identified as a leading light of the New Wave, a movement I really enjoyed. Alas, he too has been taken from us but he leaves a legacy of excellent and challenging fiction.
  
• Terry Pratchett is a lot more than just a humourist. The most recent batch of Discworld books demonstrates that. There's more to Going Postal and Making Money, or Monstrous Regiment than fantasy laffs and funny dialog, and the joy of the Discworld series is that, start to finish, it's a timeline of a style and form.
• Alfred Bester is another terribly important writer that people don't seem to have heard of, which is a shame. He's really good, and terribly clever.
• Christopher Priest is someone else who should be read. A lot. A lot more.

And this is now leaning on the long side for a blog post. Who have I left out? Everyone else. People like David Brin and Neil Gaiman, like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, like Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Anton Wilson, Charles Stross and David Langford. I left out Michael Moorcock (but that's OK because this list is a sort of tribute to passages in the Cornelius novels, I'll slip a Hawkwind reference in soon) and C.S. Lewis, I omitted E.E. "Doc" Smith and completely missed Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which is as unforgivable as missing H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne and Mary Gentle .

In fact, I've entirely failed to cover so many it's almost criminal. So remind me who I have missed and who is worth reading. Genre or not. It's what the comments are for, really. And here we stop, because lists are like roads - if you let them, they go ever, ever on.

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Hurm

I have of late, and wherefore I know not, lost all urge to visit Facebook, post on Outpost Wrinklie or go much of anywhere else other than assorted blogs.

I don't really have all that much to say at the moment.
Nor am I in much of a mood to wade through a dozen threads of sameness.

So why do I feel like a bad person because of it?

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