[  Mood: Amused ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
It is no secret that I have said some not so nice things about this series in the past, but yet I retun to it book after book, hoping that Hamilton will have gotten over exploring her sexual fantasies and actually write plot driven fiction.

It appears my prayers have finally been answered in her latest novel, Skin Trade.

And when I said that my prayers have been answered, I wasn’t kidding. Hamilton doesn’t let Anita have sex until after page 300 of the book. There are a total of three sex scenes in this book; two we see and one that we don’t. That has to be the smallest number in an Anita Blake novel in a long time.

Instead, we are treated to a plot full of tension and action, which harkens bake to the early entries in this series. We open with Anita receiving a severed head in the mail from vampire and serial killer, Vittorio. He has apperantly also left her a note, appropriately in blood, at the crime scene in hopes of drawing her to Los Vegas.

Anita has no choice but to go, but once there is forced to defend her reputation when the local cops accuse her of being a slut, while fending off the advances of another US Marshall (who is, coincidentally, also a serial killer), the political machinations of the local weretiger queen and the attempts of a very old European vampire to take control of her.

Hamilton may have finally found the balance between the sex and the action for which she claims to have been looking for all along. The only thing that detracts from the story is the constant "vetting" that Anita has to go through. Either Anita is on tough cookie who is really good at her job, or she isn’t. Having to have her prove it to every cop she runs into and go through the same arguments with the same ineundos and accusations being made is getting as tiring as the sex scenes used to be. Until she resolves this constant melodrama, her writing will never be as good as it was in the early books.

[  Mood: Silly ]
[  Currently: Listening to My son object to having a toothbrush taken away. ]
As a teacher, I have read a lot of dreck. Much of it seems to come from the teen romance genre. It pretty much sucks. Trust me.

Not so with The Luxe. The book tells the tale of young socialites in New York in the late 1800s. Our main character is Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of an old money family, who finds that due to diminished circumstances, she must marry wealthy ner-do-well Henry Schoonmaker. Nevermind that she is in love with her childhood friend (and family coachman) Will. Nevermind that her best friend, Penelope (who is from a new money family and is a little bold, our bad girl as it were) has her sights set on Henry. Nevermind that Henry seems to be falling in love with Elizabeth’s sister Diana. One thing Elizabeth knows she must do is her duty.

Or does she?

Author Godbersen has created a rich, meaty, historical romance for the YA set that is full of gossip and backstabbing. But this book owes more to Jane Austen than Gossip Girl, and that is a good thing. Slow to get going, once this book hits its stride you can’t put it down. Godbersen has also done her research, giving the story a rich backdrop full of fancy dresses and disreputable New York neighbourhoods. She has also been careful to weave in the story of the underclasses, with the characters of Will and Lina (Elizabeth’s maid) woven into the story as more than spear carriers.

I recommend this for the young woman in your life who loves reading, but for some strange reason isn’t really into genre fiction.

[  Mood: Fed Up WIth Life ]
[ Currently: Editing a podcast while my son plays. ]
As the author of the Uglies series, Scott Westerfield is a YA publishing superstar. His books have sold millions of copies, an justifiably so. His Uglies series is easily one of the best bits of sci-fi written in the last five or ten years. Adult, YA or kids – that was a good sereis.

Leviathan is the first book of his new steampunk trilogy and it is a solid outing. Set in WWI Westerfield’s vision pits the traditional machines of steampunk against the invented life forms of gene manipulation. The Darwinists are the latter, and they have mastered genetic science in a way we only dream of. This has allowed them to create life forms that take the place of machinery. Instead of zepplins, they pilot giant hydrogen inflated relatives of whales that themselves host a complete ecosystem of hydrogen sniffers and glow worms. The Darwinists make up the countries that we know as the Triple Entete, Britain, France and Russia.

The countries that are using the advanced machines are known as the clankers and they make up the Central Powers or Triple Aliance, specifically Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

In this world we meet Alex, the sole heir to Franz Ferdinan, yes, that Franz Ferdinan, who is suddenly thrust into the world of politics when his parents are murdered. He flees to Switzerland with a small group of tutors and loyal retainers. On the British side, we meet Deryn, a young woman who desperately wants to be an airman. The only problem, girls are not allowed. So Daryn becomes Dylan and joins the air service, working as a midshipman on the flagship of the British air service, Leviathan. Their two worlds collide when the Leviathan crashes in the valley where Alex is hiding. Both young people are pulled into the murk that is WWI.

Westerfield has created a masterful tale that weaves together history and an inventive twist on steampunk. I am sure someone will correct me, but I have not seen a lot of genetic manipulation in steampunk. This may be the invention of a new subgenre. What should we call it? Genepunk? Clonepunk?

Go get this.

I certainly hope you’ve seen this already, but if you haven’t, you really should check out the Symphony of Science project that autotunes Carl Sagan to create a truly magnificent video, A Glorious Dawn.

I’m not going to lie to you, I cried a bit watching that. Of course I also cry when I hear the music from Gojira.

But before you listen to Carl’s song, I want you to recall the stopsign solar system project I did earlier.

As it turns out, I wasn’t entirely correct in some of the details. As a recap, if the sun were the size of a stopsign, then the Earth would be about a block and a half away, and the nearest star would be on the other side of the planet, somewhere in China.

Here’s where I was wrong: Alpha Centauri is not the nearest star to Earth. It is the nearest star system. Alpha Centauri is, strictly speaking, three stars, or a trinary system. If I were to make a scale model of Alpha Centauri out on Clarkson Rd. and 53rd St., I would have two suns, each slightly larger than a stopsign, one of which would be at Clarkson Rd. and 53rd., and the other would be roughly the distance of Saturn’s orbit, or down near 49th Street. These two stars orbit each other roughly every 80 years, but for the microscopic humans living on the lima-bean-sized Earth over in China, these two suns (Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B) would look like a single, reasonably bright star in their sky.

The nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, the supposed companion to Alpha Centauri A and B. Proxima Centauri is about 12,000 AU away from the other pair, so by the stopsign scale it would be out by Birmingham, Alabama. A significant distance, but hardly China.

Now here is why I brought this up. This next piece of information is going to help you put the universe into a still more accurate perspective, thereby allowing you to appreciate Carl Sagan’s autotuned lyrics that much better. Here it is, the core concept:

The nearest star to Earth is not visible with the naked eye.

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, a relatively small and cool star. Red dwarf’s are some of the oldest stars in the universe because they’re so small. The hydrogen convects throughout their mass, fusing into helium in a slow and even manner that will gently smolder for billions upon billions of freaking years. Essentially until something really horrible happens to the universe in general.

It’s believed that red dwarfs make up the majority of the universe, but they only say that because we see a good deal of them in our immediate stellar neighborhood. Red dwarfs are too dim to be seen at any large distance from Earth, even with the most powerful telescopes, so it’s just a reasonable guess that they’re everywhere.

You may have heard the theory of the Nemesis Star. It’s possible that our solar system has a red dwarf companion the same way Alpha Centauri does, a star somewhere beyond the oort cloud that causes periodic showers of extinction-causing comets. Now you’re probably thinking, how could there be a star out by our stellar Birmingham, and nobody knows about it? Well, think about it, you’re the size of a microbe and you’re standing out on Clarkson, looking in the direction of Birmingham, or even just Bastrop. You’re only going to see something half the size of a stopsign if it’s pretty damn bright.
Question of the day. What’s the most famous recurring comet we know of? It’s Halley’s Comet: http://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery/is-seeing-a-comet-like-halley-s-a-once-in-a-lifetime-event/

But that’s why we have powerful telescopes and sky mapping software. If there is a Nemesis Star, it’s already been mapped and recorded. We just don’t know how far away it is. With red dwarfs it’s hard to calculate their distance because of their low luminosity. The Nemesis Star could have fallen between the cracks. A star in a haystack of stars.

So I hope that gives the universe a little more depth. Now go and listen to Carl Sagan, and when he mentions the galaxy-rise of 400 billion stars, remember that most of those stars are so dim that their light was lost in the great darkness before even their closest neighbors could see it.

[  Mood: Hypnotized ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
As I have said before, my grandmother had a name for work like Evanovich’s; toothache books. They aren’t going change your life or even make you think too deeply, but you will chuckle and, occasionally, guffaw.

This "in-between the numbers" book finds Diesel reappearing in Stephanie’s life, this time after a man named Wulf who is working with one of Stephanie’s FTAs. Only problem, Wulf seems to be able to shoot electricity out of his hands and dissappear at will. Stephanie reluctantly agrees to work with the hunky Diesel, if only to get his help out capturing the missing FTA . . . and get him out of her apartment.

This is much better than her last book, Finger Licking Fifteen, as Evanovich has be judicious in her use of Lula. Just enough for the humour, but not so much as to be annoying. Plum Spooky also differs as, like the other "Between the Numbers" books, it has a supernatural element. Not a heavy supernatural element, Diesel can open doors and start cars without a key. This is a great way to spend unwind when you are stressed and just need some brain candy, but nothing more.