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It's Magic
Mar. 17th, 2007 08:04 amI finished reading Greg Bear's Eon this week. It's a solid read - a humongous asteroid arrives in Earth orbit, researchers and soldiers from various nations go up to explore, and find a series of chambers inside the asteroid that literally goes on for ever. The rock is from an alternate universe, with a fairly large population of "reincarnated" humans and a few aliens here and there.
What really got me thinking, though, was the timing and dates of the novel. It's set, initially, in 2005, and was published in 1985. So, I'm reading a book written about an event 20 years in the writer's future that takes place 2 years in the reader's past. There are Soviet explorers on the asteroid (called "The Stone" by most), complete with a good party man political officer, and that made me think about something William Gibson wrote in the 10th anniversary edition of Neuromancer (an edition itself now 13 years old) - none of the cyberpunk writers imagined a world without the Soviet Union, but they had no problem at all with the United States broken apart. I've always wondered about that; I guess there was more faith in a totalitarian state than a democratic one.
I followed it up with A Brief History of Time. Big-time science, some of the history of it, and all written in a very friendly manner. Stephen Hawking goes from the first instant of the Big Bang through the universe's expansion and evolution and to the eventual Big Crunch and the reset of it all.
Last night, I finally got to see Y tu Mama Tambien on IFC, and I'm kicking myself for never seeing this before. It's funny, infuriating, very sexy, and just a little bit sad. If you haven't seen it, rent it soonest.
What really got me thinking, though, was the timing and dates of the novel. It's set, initially, in 2005, and was published in 1985. So, I'm reading a book written about an event 20 years in the writer's future that takes place 2 years in the reader's past. There are Soviet explorers on the asteroid (called "The Stone" by most), complete with a good party man political officer, and that made me think about something William Gibson wrote in the 10th anniversary edition of Neuromancer (an edition itself now 13 years old) - none of the cyberpunk writers imagined a world without the Soviet Union, but they had no problem at all with the United States broken apart. I've always wondered about that; I guess there was more faith in a totalitarian state than a democratic one.
I followed it up with A Brief History of Time. Big-time science, some of the history of it, and all written in a very friendly manner. Stephen Hawking goes from the first instant of the Big Bang through the universe's expansion and evolution and to the eventual Big Crunch and the reset of it all.
Last night, I finally got to see Y tu Mama Tambien on IFC, and I'm kicking myself for never seeing this before. It's funny, infuriating, very sexy, and just a little bit sad. If you haven't seen it, rent it soonest.