Avram's journal

The new Tim Powers book is out! Three Days to Never, and it just got released like yesterday. I discovered this fact when I saw an ad on Amazon.com. Didn’t even realize it was a Powers book; I just saw a bit of description: “...the mummified head of an Einstein clone is helping a secret sect...” and who could resist following up on that?

Anyway, I bought it in hardcover, even though I’ve got a general policy against reading hardcovers. (And crap, I’d’ve saved $12 ordering it from Amazon. But then I’d’ve had to wait till late next week to read it.) And even though the back carries this astonishingly off-putting blurb:

“Three Days to Never is a hurricane blowing away the stale postmodern sensibility of most fiction. Because Powers knows that science poses its questions in search of a predetermined answer, this book is a swift, colorful pursuit of the truth visible only to those with humility and a sense of wonder.” — Dean Koontz

I’ve never read anything by Koontz, and after that I’m not likely to. I wonder if he knows anything about either postmodernism or science.

We just got back from Arisia a little bit ago. I had the two worst Chinatown bus trips ever. On the way up, I just missed the 3 PM bus (the guy in front of me got the last ticket), so wound up on the 3:30 overflow bus, which was a short bus, with seats for 25 people. I‘d gone off to buy food for the trip, and wound up the 25th person on line, stuck in the back with four other guys in that supposedly-five-person-wide-but-actually-more-like-four-and-a-half seat in the back. And no reading lights, so I couldn’t read once it got dark. And then on the way back we also got a short bus (7 PM), and this one actually had a broken seat and a cracked windshield.

The con itself was wonderful. Tim Powers gave a very entertaining GoH speech, and I got to chat with him a bit later in the day, but I forgot to ask him what he’s working on now. I got some gaming in (The Great Brain Robbery, Agora, and giant Ice Towers), and the party-hopping was some of the most fun I’d had at a con in years. I wound up inadvertently crashing not one, but two parties I oughtn’t have been at, and I got to hang out in the Park Plaza’s presidential suite. I asked Eric Raymond if he knew of any open-source handgun designs, which has to be the ultimate Eric Raymond question. (He didn’t.)

(Oh, in the photo of people playing Ice Towers with the giant cardboard pieces, taken at Worldcon in 2001, I’m the guy at the far left in the shorts, and mnemex is the one at the far right in the white t-shirt.)

There was a whole lot of cleavage on display at this con. Serious amounts of major industrial cantilevered cleavage, cleavage you could serve snacks on, sometimes with inclusions. I don’t mind at all, I’m just sayin’.

And a thousand thanks to drcpunk and mnemex for putting me up!