Monday, October 25, 2004

Although the election threatens to make political bores of us all, the world does continue to spin round while we, in amber, hang suspended, awaiting the moment of decision. Dave A, a noted nonreader, has suddenly started devouring George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I just loaned him the second and third volumes.

I mostly hung out at his place last weekend, helping him clean things out & helping him and his folks move some new couches in to replace the wrecked old set. I kind of miss the old Quest Labs days, when we had a balcony to fling unsatisfactory furniture off of, onto the grass below. They made quite amusing shattering noises, when the impact broke whatever remnants of a back said furniture might still have possessed. It was ever so much more easier than trying to get the couches out the tight corridors... You don’t get that visceral joy from furniture-disposal in a ground floor apartment. I mean, you can batter a couch pretty thoroughly by repeatedly flipping it end-for-end through the grass and over the asphalt, but it takes a lot of energy and wind to do that sort of damage, without the gravitational advantage of a good, solid couch-defenestration.

I’m reading a lot of Walter Jon Williams, in anticipation of the publishing-date of the last book in his Dread Empire’s Fall space opera, coming up at the beginning of next month. Martin and Williams are the two authors I go to the trouble of ordering British editions from Amazon.co.uk for; of course, they’re also the two authors I read mostly likely to get printed in Great Britain *before* getting printed here in North America, so there might be a bit of selection-bias going on here. I really like Williams, and he keeps getting better. I’m reading City on Fire right now, and it just feels so heavily predictive, prescient even, of the current troubles. It’s a damned shame that he never got the chance to finish the trilogy - City on Fire and Metropolitan cry out for a proper ending.

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