"Every damn morning"

This is why I started keeping a notebook next to my bed to write down dreams.

Peter Dickinson said that the first chapter of The Weathermonger came to him in a dream. Who knows, I could write a novel.

In case you're wondering, the mouseover text on this xkcd strip is a quote from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lucy sneaks into the magician's rooms to find a spell to restore the Monopods, and reads a spell "for the refreshment of the spirit" that turns into a beautiful reverie, but fades from memory as it ends. This essayist believes that the objects Lucy remembers - a cup, a sword, a tree, and a green hill - are a reference to the agony, death, and resurrection of Christ, the story that all other good stories remind us of in one way or another.

I couldn't quite remember whether it was from Lewis or Tolkien.

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Speaking of the Chronicles of Narnia, FlowerMoonFish and I were discussing the Prince Caspian movie on the phone and she says that the reason Peter and Caspian were written as a pair of testosterone-drenched idiots was that (quoting someone else) "the art of our time can't recognize nobility".

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Speaking of nobility, I hope that Raja Petra's right and our King doesn't let AAB and gang call a snap election to screw around with Pakatan Rakyat's chances of taking over the government. Sure they're mostly figureheads in a parliamentary democracy...and history has proved over and over again that heredity confers nothing in morality or intelligence...yet I still find myself hoping that when needed the Agong will act, with nobility.

Prince Caspian quickie review

We went to see Prince Caspian yesterday with some Grad Christian Fellowship kakis. It's a pretty good movie...I'd rate it 8/10 all around.

For the most part, it stayed true to the book except:

• There are a few scenes showing discussions between Miraz, Sopespian, Rozelle, and the other Telmarine lords. I don't have a problem with this since their function is explaining Telmarine politics that are narrated in the books in another way.
• During the scene with Nikabrik and his black magic cronies, they actually summon up the White Witch. If I hadn't read the books I would have gotten the impression that she was going to be a recurring villain.
• Before the duel between Peter and Miraz, there's an SAS paratrooper-style raid on the Telmarines' castle which is a lot of fun to watch for the action scenes, but doesn't advance the plot in any way, so I thought it was really weird that the filmmakers wrote it in.

Special effects and action scenes are really good for the most part, except for one really weird bit where the Narnians use a tactic of making the roof fall in on themselves, which I thought was silly.

In terms of characters: Peter is full of testosterone, and himself. One fellow in the group who's a Peter fan commented that after the moral and military mistakes he made, he wasn't given enough time to redeem himself. Susan shows up really well in the action scenes and flirts outrageously with Caspian, much to the younger ones' scorn. ("I'm sure I'll understand when I'm larger." "I'm larger and I'm not sure I want to understand.") Edmund shines - both as a character in this book, and through Skandar Keynes' perfect deadpan delivery of his lines (I dunno where that name is from but it sounds totally Viking). Lucy, as before, is adorable. Caspian is a bit of a nonentity. He sort of reminds me of Hamlet.

As for Reepicheep: holy cow, I'm glad the mice in my lab don't fight like that.

Blood

I have too much of a taste for gore sometimes. I spent all of this afternoon sampling blood from chickens and while I didn't enjoy the heat, the smell, or the ache in my legs, there's something very satisfying about seeing the red stuff flowing smoothly into the syringe, or in garnet drops down the white feathers...

(Somewhere in between last Tuesday's draw and today's, they crossed the line from being baby chicks to young chickens. I had no idea feathers could replace fluffy down so fast, enabling three-foot leaps out of the hands of exasperated scientists. It gives you an appreciation of the progress between Velociraptor to Archaeopteryx.)

Also, I just finished a novel by Natsuo Kirino about a bunch of Japanese housewives who find themselves cutting up a series of dead bodies, stalked by a sadistic murderer, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And finally, last week I spent some time on eBay and acquired McFarlane Toys' seriously perverted version of Little Red Riding Hood:
Is there anything about this figurine which is not, as the Americans say, Kick Ass? (In case you can't tell, the blobby thing at the bottom of the Big Bad Wolf's entrails is Grandma.)
She occupies the place of pride on my bookshelf, above where another McFarlane figurine, my old friend the xenomorph hangs. (The Alien quadrilogy is a whole another level of gore...)

Hey, at least I don't pretend to be a vampire and write emo poetry!

SF&F quantitation theory

Quickie theory: the quality of a science fiction or fantasy author's world-building skills can be measured by the ratio of fan-generated wiki text : author's original text in novels and short stories concerning that particular universe.

I came up with this idea because there's a surprising number of Wikipedia entries regarding Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series, which is only 3 novels and one short story so far. (It's not a trilogy because he's promised at least one more novel.)

A good author should be able to write a world that is internally consistent, and describe its history, rules, characters, and other contents by context alone, spending minimal time on explanations that don't flow naturally into the story (e.g. Harry Potter being raised by Muggles and having to be shown around the wizarding world). The characteristics of being internally consistent and having a lot of interesting content that's touched on glancingly by the author gives fans a lot of material to organize into synopses, timelines, histories, protocols, etc.

I tend to dislike most books that give you a long glossary at the end, the exceptions being the Lord of the Rings and David Brin's Uplift series. Brin has a bloody menagerie of alien civilizations, but he focuses tightly on the experiences and feelings of individual characters in the narrative itself. As far as I'm concerned, if I have to keep flipping back and forth between the story and explanations in the back, I might as well be reading research papers.

I ran this idea past Krista who's one of my fantasy fiction buddies and she said it sounded workable. Anyone else agree?

Dwarves, elves, no trolls

Stupid Internet. I'm reading Heretics of Dune, right, and because the Master Tylwyth Waff of the Bene Tleilax is described as being only a meter and a half tall, I go to look up on tvtropes.org if there's anything about why dwarves are always evil...

...an hour and a half later I find myself looking up Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic on Amazon.com, having read the TVTropes articles on Elves vs. Dwarves and the Fair Folk a.k.a. evil fairies, read the Wikipedia entry on Tam Lin, written a review on E.M. Pope's The Perilous Gard (I LOVE that book), and read Gaiman's version of Snow White where the stepmother queen is a good witch and Snowy is a vampire (white skin and blood-red lips, mah). *groan*

Anyway...I'm going off to wash dishes and play with the Dremel tool Steve gave me for Christmas. Yay new toy!

The fate of tattoos

I'm taking Immunology this sem with labmate Angela and boyfriend Steve (and my poor engineer is going to die of acronym bombardment, he's not used to us biologists). So far we're going over the basics...classes of immune cells, the difference between adaptive and innate immunity and whatnot.

If you're a layperson reading this and want to know a bit about immunology I recommend Lennart Nilsson's dramatically beautiful The Body Victorious - you can see some pics from it here. He's most famous for A Child Is Born, which is the one that has all those neat pictures of fetuses.

Anyway, the prof today was talking about macrophages, which are big cells that eat things (you can basically figure it out from the name if you know Greek). One slide was about tattoos, and it finally answered the question I've been wondering about, which is why don't the macrophages eat up the tattoo ink and carry it away?
(Slide copyright Gary A. Splitter)

Actually, I like Sgt. Colon's explanation better (from Terry Pratchett's Jingo, which I think should be recommended reading for all citizens of any nation with a military):

"Sarge," said Nobby, as they looked out at the wonders of the deep.
"Yes, Nobby?"
"You know they say every tiny part of your body is replaced every seven years?"
"A well-known fact," said Sergeant Colon.
"Right. So...I've got a tattoo on my arm, right? Had it done eight years ago. So...how come it's still there?"
Giant seaweeds winnowed the gloom.
"Interesting point," quavered Colon. "Er..."
"I mean, okay, new tiny bits of skin float in, but that means it ought to be all new and pink by now."
A fish with a nose like a saw swam past.
In the middle of all of his other fears, Sergeant Colon tried to think fast.
"What happens," he said, "is that all the blue skin bits are replaced by other blue skin bits. Off'f other peoople's tattoos."
"So...I've got other people's tattoos now?"
"Er...yes."
"Amazing. 'cos it still looks like mine. 's got the crossed daggers and 'WUM.'"
"Wum?"
"It was gonna be 'Mum' but I passed out and Needle Ned didn't notice I was upside down."

Pottermania bandwagon

I think the most popular PDF of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that's floating around may be a fake. Either that, or if it's real then Bloomsbury and Scholastic publishers are guilty of appallingly bad proofreading in a book this important.

Being the kind of person who, by and large, doesn't mind spoilers, I went and read the (alleged) plot outline on Wikipedia, downloaded the PDF, and clicked right to the epilogue only to find this on page 634:

“You’ll right to me, won’t you?” [name deleted] asked his parents immediately, capitalizing on the momentary absence of his brother.

Hehehe oh well.

I think I may just wait for my Harry Potter fan friend to finish and ask if I can borrow hers.

In other news, four major booksellers in Malaysia are refusing to sell HP7 because the hypermarket chains Tesco (from the UK) and Carrefour (French) are selling it at RM69.90 instead of the official retail price of RM109.90. I suspect they'll whip out their copies and still make a killing once the hypermarkets run out of stock.

Blackhawk typo

This is to the last person who commented on my blog and anyone else who goes to Blackhawk Church...there was a typo in their flyer...if anyone's interested in the Science Fiction and Fantasy group, the email address starts with "sfandf", not "fandf"!

Apparently the contact form on Blackhawk's site works okay, but then their emails end up in my spam folder. Sorry guys.

Sci-fi heroines

Late night, at random: Even though I like both science fiction and fantasy fiction very much, I realised a few days ago that my favourite female characters are all in SF and not fantasy. The problem with fantasy heroines is that many of the writers are from new-agey backgrounds and tend to flavour their writing with strong feminist overtones. Mother goddesses give you power. Bonus points if you like girls. Extra bonus points if you like girls AND boys. It's only ok to like men if they're not macho and have long hair. It's just blatant and annoying. (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, et al.) And I don't know what's wrong with fantasy writers of this stripe, but they just CAN'T do good dialogue.

The problem with these writers is that they're from countries where women already have gained suffrage, at least nominal equality in education and the workplace, etc., quite some time ago, so they have a lack of imagination as to what it's like to live in a really old-fashioned culture. You can't run around making strident declarations of emancipation and jumping on horseback waving a sword straightaway the way these bra-burning heroines do. People wouldn't even persecute you - they'd just laugh at you like crazy.

Sci-fi heroines, on the other hand, are strong women making their way in a world which, no matter how developed or how far in the future, is to some degree still more influenced by men. They live in worlds where the ultimate arbiter of fate is how tough and ingenious you are (and obviously you have to be on the side of Good as well, this being fiction), which to my mind is much more realistic. I love Ellen Ripley. Love Kathryn Janeway. Love Cordelia Naismith, Samantha Carter, Mara Jade, Leia Organa, Molly Millions, Lilith Iyapo, Anyanwu, et cetera, et cetera. Starting to get into "Firefly" and Zoey is cool too.

On the other hand I find most of Anne McCaffrey's characters annoying, possibly because she's from the same aging-hippy background.

(Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 are written by multiple people, many of whom are women, Lilith and Anyanwu are from Octavia Butler, Cordelia Naismith is from Lois McMaster Bujold, so don't tell me it's cos I only like female characters written by men. =P)

The only strongly feminist fantasy writer that doesn't annoy me is Robin McKinley, not sure why. (I like Ursula Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuan" because the main character was trapped in a female-only environment which was portrayed as being ultra - hee.) Too late at night to do analysis. Figure out later. [Incidentally, FlowerMoonFish told me why almost all McKinley's novels involve romance between the younger female lead and a much older male character - her husband is Peter Dickinson and he's pretty old compared to her.]

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

- "Firefly" theme

SF writer personality test, and Snape fandom

I have no idea who this is at all. Steve got Octavia Butler *sulk* I love Butler.

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Interesting Snape fansite with essays on why he didn't murder Dumbledore: I Trust Snape