avram | Grump grump grump

I taped the first five or ten minutes of Firefly last night. What the tape was doing that close to the end, I have no fucking idea; I should have had an hour of leeway.

I finished Sean Stewart’s Galveston last night on the way home from Games Club. Amazingly good. He’s got a bunch of novels (unrelated save for the setting, so you can read them in any order) set in a near-future world where magic came back in 2004 and crashed civilization, and they’re all good, and this is the best of them. One thing I really admire is his eye for detail — Galveston has a wealth of detailed observations about poker, dressing and makeup, pharmceuticals and medicine, and a bit about gas pipelines, and I have no doubt that it’s all accurate.

Stopped off at the library looking for a copy of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire (non-fiction about the history of the relationship between people and plants), but they didn’t have a copy that wasn’t checked out or in transit. I picked up my copy of Jo Walton’s The King’s Peace, which I’ve been meaning to read for over a year now, started it, and put it down again. I’m not in the mood for pseudo-Arthurian fantasy right now; I want science fiction. Something crunchy, a Bruce Sterling novel or Neal Stephenson. Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom would probably do the trick, but it’s not out yet. I don’t have any handy that I haven’t already read, so I think I’ll be making do with a copy of Fritz Leiber’s A Specter is Haunting Texas that I picked up used at a Readercon years ago and never got around to reading.