It's Saturday morning and there is a light drizzle outside. In a few hours I'm heading off to Dodgers Stadium to watch the boys in blue beat the world champion Angels. It should be a good game and I get a chance to eat Dodger Dogs and drink big plastic cups of beer.
I finished up two books recently that I hadn't got around to reviewing yet.
In the Hall of the Martian King - John Barnes
The third book in the Jak Jinnaka series, this novel started off similar to the previous novels with Jak almost stumbling through the advenutre with little initiative and many pushes from outside. In the middle of the book, this changes where Jak actually takes charge and starts making things happen of his own accord. The first real tragedy of series occurs and the tone of the book changes dramatically. In the second half, the novel becomes a bit more philisophical and touches on the issue of the effect on society when long held truths are found to be false.
A good fast read, worth the paperback price. It will be interesting to see where the next novel takes us.
Promised Land - Cynthia Felice & Connie Willis
I've enjoyed Connie Willis's books in the past and found this book in a used book store for cheap. The story is really a romance in a sci-fi wrapper. Not that I dislike romances, but I'm used to sci-fi stories with different kinds of issues the characters are trying to resolve.
You'll find yourself at first angry with the protaganist, Delanna, and then excited as she changes her ways. The world they live in doesn't make a ton of sense, but it's believeable enough for the stories purposes.
The book is out of print, but if you see it at the library or a used book store it's worth putting on the shelf as an 'emergency reserve'.
Gaming
I've been playing Planetside a bit and am really enjoying it. There is a new feature that allows for autogeneration of a stat picture of your character. Check it out.
The Planetside site generates the image nightly and once you put in the link, the image remains constant. They even have an XML feed of your stats so you can create whatever you want from the data. Looks like I'm gunna have to learn XML feeds one of these days.
Posted by michael at June 21, 2003 10:34 AM