On the literary front, I ploughed through the back-catalogue of Jack Campbell, reading through his militaristic space-opera. Readable, entertaining, and demolished at great pace, if not of any great literary merit. I read the Peter F Hamilton short story collection, Manhattan in Reverse (some great concepts in there), two Ben Aaronovitch PC Grant novels (great dark urban fantasy set in London, reminding me lots of Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books), the latest Terry Pratchett (wonderful, wonderful – more sophisticated and engaging that some of his other recent Discworld books), and a book by a client’s wife, Death at the Chateau Bremont – a fun murder mystery set in the South of France. I’ve got through more of Brandon Sanderson’s back catalogue (including the fantasy/Western the Alloy of Law – great fun!), and now I have a stack of books to get through from Amazon’s 12 Days of Kindle (currently reading the End Specialist about a world in which death is cured (99p on Kindle!), and the final Eragon novel) and from various Christmas presents (including the new Holmes, and some exciting fantasy and SF from Arvind).

TV-wise, thanks to my brother I’ve gotten into Modern Family (funny ‘cos its true), Community (funny ‘cos its off the wall and geeky), and via other recommendations/my own recognizance, Transformers Prime (after the horror of Michael Bay, this was a true wonder of storytelling – absolutely brilliant), Young Justice, Batman: the Brave and the Bold (thanks Arvy, brilliant) and Fringe (trashy but entertaining). I’ve dipped into Terra Nova (meh, Outcasts with dinosaurs) and Parks and Recreation too (not sure yet). I’ve been enjoying the Christmas specials too – Doctor Who nearly made me cry, Eastenders had me on the edge of my seat, and the AbFab specials gave me pause to giggle. Our sole cinematic expedition was to Mission Impossible 4 (a great ad for BMW, and fun as you’d expect it to be), and we watched Kung Fu Panda 2 on DVD on the bank holiday Monday. The Inbetweeners Movie awaits me on DVD…

So I’ve not been idling from that perspective, at least! More recommendations / comments on my reading/viewing history appreciated!

A reboot of a sci-fi novel I haven’t read, I was relying on Scalzi’s characteristic style to make the story entertaining and he doesn’t disappoint. Whilst carrying all the hallmarks of a traditional space-opera, the lead protagonist is a lawyer (disbarred, but not for not knowing the law, as he’s anxious to let people know) and as a consequence the whole book runs more like a particularly strong episode of Boston Legal than a sci-fi space saga, complete with morally ambiguous James-Spader-esque courtroom shenanigans.

The story follows the discovery of a rich seam of natural resources on a colony world in tandem with the discovery of a potentially sentient species, and the legal battles and political maneuvering that follows to carry the story through to its inevitable conclusion.

It’s a lot of fun, highly recommended.

Whilst superficially the stories follow a pair of criminal investigations, the theses tested include the implications of a world of augmented-reality gaming and digital infrastructure gone mad, and examining the nature of artificial intelligence and the potential evolution of spam-filtration into possibly sentient moral arbitration. It’s absolutely fascinating and terrifyingly possible, and when discussed via the mechanism of a criminal investigation and some very weird people, thoroughly, thoroughly entertaining.

Anyway, have finished Rule 34 now. Highly, highly recommended, and I’m looking forward to the next concept Mr Stross decides to test in his Scottish near-future world.

The experience reminds of when I first ploughed through Asimov’s Foundation series – whilst that ended up a fairly typical space-opera, the series initially was a testing ground for a deterministic philosophy of human society and a theoretical science. At least, that’s how I saw it when it was the subject of my BA philosophy of science thesis…

Not DVDs or CDs; the convenience factor of the digital format there is just vast – but with books, the comforting, colourful, aesthetically pleasing albeit inevitably dusty presence across the room as they sit solidly in a bookshelf… well, their future absence will be noted.

I do occasionally still buy print books – for anything Amanda needs to read, or Emily (my girls are old school and the tactility of books is awesome and necessary for Em) – and occasionally for a long running series of books or novel I know I’ll end up sharing.

So Terry Pratchett, Raymond Feist et al, will continue to be bought in print. Because I’m faintly obsessive compulsive, I’ll also probably complete any series of novels I started to buy in physical form – Peter F Hamilton’s ‘Void’ trilogy was one case in point, despite the enormity of those hardbacks. Fortunately, I read my way through all of George R R Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series in digital format, so  was spared the 1,000 page monster of the new book as a bookshelf counterweight.

But there are some shelves in our house that may end up with ornaments and niknackery on them instead of books. Which – as someone that’s spent a decade without enough shelf-space – is something I find strange in the extreme.

I’m not sure how to feel about the news that an H2G2 app is coming. I have a feeling that 90% of the stuff you put into it will come out with some generic, smart-arsey, “we don’t have an article on that” response, because – after all – how could the app genuinely be about everything in the galaxy? And – if we’re being true to Douglas’ narrative – the entry for Earth as a whole – it’s people, history, plant-life, etc., – simply reads ‘Mostly harmless’ – then what use is it on this planet? It’s been a while since I saw a pan-galactic Gargle blaster on the menu at any unfashionable London bar. Certainly not one that uses real gold.

Anyway, it’s piqued my curiosity. I gather the people making it are true gaming experts, so might have successfully ‘gamified’ the guide… but I’ll believe it when I see it. Read more over on Wired.

The follow up to another favourite near-future read of mine by Stross, Halting State, the world of Rule 34 is a near-future Scotland in which a few polis protagonists cope with a seedy, run down, cyberpunk dystopia – filled with semi-believable technology (AR glasses and overlays, 3D printers and the associated black market, etc etc) – which are absolutely fascinating. And Charlie tells of them with his easy, occasionally impenetrable (due to the need to interpret a written interpretation of strong Scottish accents) prose and dialogue.

A ready pleasure.

Unfortunately, at 360 pages, it’s not going to last long. So I’m going to need more book recommendations…

Was amused by Chuck’s late season-4 line: "Come on, Eddard, that’s a crazy idea. You can’t let your sons keep direwolves!"

It was a piece of uniquely poor parenting, come to think of it. Eddard, for all his lordly gravitas and honour, caring fatherly looks and love, made a number of poor parenting decisions. Em is never getting a direwolf – maybe a puppy, but that’s where I draw the line!

Here are a few of his parenting highlights:

• letting all his children, age 4-17, keep direwolves, giant man eating wolves
• letting his eldest (bastard) son make a permanent, unalterable life choice at the age of 17
• bringing his two daughters into the most dangerous city in the world

Anyone else pick out any other particularly poor parenting decisions by Lord Stark?

Also, this 16 bit RPG summary of season one of Game of Thrones is brilliant:

I tip my proverbial hat to you sir.

As I get to within the last couple of hundred pages (yes, it’s a long book) my only worry is what to read next to take away the pain of the wait until volume six comes out…

My comment was – as long as the stories are internally coherent and the worlds interesting, I still enjoy them. That’s part of the joy of being a sci-fi/fantasy fan – you get to suspend your disbelief and take some time off to dwell in a totally different universe.

Sometimes, what’s compelling is the similarity with our own universe. This is the case with the Walking Dead – there’s very little supernatural mysticism in the way the tale is told. Something – indeterminate but presumably natural – has caused the dead to walk, but it relates to the brain stem and you have to stop it with a physical intervention (i.e. destroy the brainstem). You can’t banish it, or exorcise it, or cast a spell and make it go away.

Unfortunately one of the things rooting stories in the real world does is allow for semi-rational analysis. For example…. the zombies are moving, movement takes energy. The zombies might draw on latent energy stores in their own bodies, but beyond that they need nourishment to replenish energy stocks. Nourishment for zombies comes from humans. The humans are (mostly) dead – ergo no food for zombies. Therefore in time, zombies must surely run out of energy and stop moving (as indeed happens in 28 Days Later)… And yet, in the comics, nearly two years has passed since the Zombie apocalypse and there’s still herds of them moving around. So that jars, slightly.

The second issue seems to be that whenever someone falls victim to a zombie or two, they get eaten alive. That being the premise – humans are food. So the question emerges – where do new zombies come from? If a new zombie is only spawned when an old zombie gets full, then the apocalypse would likely be less complete and have been more controllable.

Perhaps this is overanalysing the situation. Or perhaps it all feeds into the inexorably drawn out exposition plan for the authors of the Walking Dead, who’ve spent 7 years telling the story and never given a hint away as to the cause of Zombie-ism…

Emily’s been a bit small for stories to be read to her and hold her attention, but we’ve taken her through a few board books here and there. One of my client’s recently mentioned that their HR director has a philosophy based on a children’s book, "Some Dogs Do," so, sufficiently intrigued, I bought it as a gift for Emily on her return from Denmark.

After supper one night, with her attention locked in by virtue of being in her high-chair with nowhere to scamper off to, I read her the book to peals of giggles and laughter. Again, at nine months, I’m not sure how much she’s taking in but perhaps I manage to hit on some of the vocal magic my Dad used on us when we were kids to entertain and delight.

Either way, it’s a special pleasure for me and I look forward to more storytime fun in the future.

Scalzi has a fun analysis on why this book has taken so long for George R R Martin to write – at over 400,000 words, in essence, it is the length of four or five lesser books, which a man might have churned out at a rate of one a year. So he’s basically written 4 regular sized books, or two jumbo sized fantasy epics, in one. Sterling effort, my good man, sterling effort.

There’s a lot of hype around this book, not least because it’s been four years in the writing, the critically acclaimed HBO series has launched in the meantime, and, well, the fact that its a great story. I’m going to resist buying it until I’m through the excellent Mistborn saga (down to the last half book of that), and will probably then get the eBook to help me get through the 1000 odd pages of the new novel without lugging a massive tome around with me.

The iPhone app that accompanies the book launch comes complete with a summary of the previous books (invaluable for a quick recap, especially if you’re not sure how much ground the TV series has covered and want a reminder) as well as a few other goodies, so I will refresh my memory ahead of getting the book in.

I’m blitzing my way through Brandon Sanderson’s ‘Mistborn’ trilogy and enjoying it profoundly. He has an effortless way with world-building that’s wondrous without being painstakingly expository.

One of the things I particularly like about the books is that he’s given himself a clearly defined set of constraints within which his heroes operate. "Magic" in the world of Mistborn consists of a set of powers derived from consuming and draining metals (and some variants on that I won’t go into here).

The nice thing about this mode of storytelling is that you’re never confronted with the dread Deus Ex Machina – that scenario where the odds are stacked against our hero, but he says some random spell in pig-Latin that no-one knew he knew, or that has the exact power needed to snuff the baddies’ ambitions (I’m looking at you, Potter).

It means that the world is internally consistent and whilst there are surprises, you never feel cheated by cheap storytelling. I think its an awesome thing and am fast becoming a Sanderson fan.

Unnecessary sequel
This was not a story that needed telling, as Eoin himself was well aware. Douglas may have had a sixth novel planned but there was no obvious place to go – the last we saw of our heroes, they were on the verge of being dead and, well, unless you’re writing a Zombie thriller, a novel full of dead people isn’t massively compelling…. something which Eoin recognised but thought he’d have a go at anyway.

Too courageous
Eoin tried really, really hard to pay tribute to the best traditions of Douglas’ series. Really, I think this should have meant that he took more than eight months to write it and he should have torn it up several times in the course of its development. After all – Douglas’ love of deadlines is well documented (especially the sound of them whooshing past). Where Douglas’ books felt painstakingly iterated, moulded, cajoled, and sometimes brutally hammered into place, Eoin seems to write with the same, effortless grace with which he produced his Artermis Fowl books. For me, this meant it read like something completely different…

Too linear
The charm of Douglas – in many regards – was that his brain worked in ways that no-one else’s did. Eoin himself writes in the afterword to the edition I read that he specifically picked on “the obvious way” of getting our heroes out of the pickle Douglas left them in at the end of Mostly Harmless. Would Douglas have done that? Maybe. But somehow I think repeating a trick would have been on the far end of the probability spectrum for Douglas.

The wrong stars
The previous books were about Arthur. He was the character you could empathise with, he was the character whose muddle-headed, dressing-gowned, tea-drinking Englishness that made it real for the reader. This book? Features The Guide, Zaphod and Trillian as its main characters. How easy is it to empathise with the mega-egotistical president of the Universe? Not that easy, even for me. And the guide’s interruptions seemed more frequent and expansive than Douglas’ own diversions, amusing as they often are.

In short, this was a valiant effort, by Mr Colfer. But I really wish you hadn’t.

Postscript: I’d like to add that I am a big fan of Eoin Colfer. I own and have read every one of his books. I wanted to like this novel more than I did, and it wasn’t terrible by any means, despite my harshness above – I did get through it in a week! But touching on something as good (I want to say sacred but that seems ludicrously sanctimonious and Douglas would probably have hated that) as the H2G2 series was perhaps a challenge too far. Especially as Mostly Harmless itself was already something of an unnecessary extension, IMHO…

I’m neither loving nor loathing the experience (as far as turning actual pages is concerned). There’s a combination of the satisfaction of page turning and feeling your way through the bulk of a novel that’s satisfying, but there’s the fiddly inconvenience of not having it when you have a couple of minutes in a lift to read, or trying to read it at night in bed with an irritating, barely functional reading light, or trying to squeeze it into your work satchel between the car keys, Macbook and iPad…