Via Google Trends. It seems like the “Facebook Phenomenon” is where the “MySpace Phenomenon” was 2 years ago culturally. My prediction is that 1 year from now you won’t hear much about Facebook, it looks like the buzz is already flattening out, though it will take a little while for people to notice….
Author: razib
Geek no like….
Got my first Vista-installed laptop today…OMG! Very bad. Very, very, bad. I haven’t had to deal with blue screens since pre-XP service pack days, but Vista has already been cranky…though I would admit that when it chokes it is elegant. Why oh why can’t Microsoft hirer UI guys???
Substitue one brown geek for another….
Hey all, just a heads up that I’ll be filling in as well while Aziz is out of the house. Just some info, I normally blog @ gnxp and @ gnxp. I’m a nerd & a geek wrapped up in one package. My geekiness tends to express itself in a nostalgia for Dr. Who and a contemporary interest in science fiction & high fantasy. In the domains of nerdiness I’m into evolution, hard-core!
1/(Tolkien) || Tolkien*(-1)
I don’t have as much time to read fantasy and science fiction as I did when I was younger, but I would like to recommend two series which I stumbled upon over the past few years and which I just completed.
Jaqueline Carey’s Banewreaker and Godslayer comprise a slim duology which can be fairly characterized as LotR from the vantage-point of Mordor. The correspondences to Tolkien’s narrative are pretty clear and transparent, Carey hits you over the head with her themes. This would probably have been better as a singleton, there just isn’t that much material to work with, and the characterization doesn’t explore new directions in the second book. Nevertheless, it is a nice and satisfying corrective to the Fundamental Attribution Error which crops up in the work of Tolkien and his children, evil is essentialistic in a character, not a function of their circumstance. In some ways Carey’s work has a closer affinity with Greek mythology, with its Prometheus like Sauron equivalent. In contrast Tolkien might not have been totally delusional when he stated that LotR was “fundamentally a Catholic work” in that his cycle did not explore the messy shades of gray which comprise such a vast arc of human experience.
Where Carey’s work is a standard inversion of Tolkien’s narrative, R. Scott Baker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy takes the classic core of high fantasy and the Evil Lord and smokes it with some crack cocaine. If there was ever a sequence of books laced with the sensibility of the cognitive revolution, this is it. Baker is a philosopher by training so I am not totally convinced that the influence is coincidental. If you want a “hero” who brings you down to earth with his lack of idealism, then this is a good series. The last of Baker’s books in the trilogy has a 50 page glossary so he certainly hasn’t stinted on world creation. But with the sharp crispness of the backdrop and the overindulgent prose the many strands of each character can sometimes get knotted, and Baker’s inattention leaves you without a guide out of this undiscovered country. Unfortunately Baker’s “trilogy” is actually the first three acts in a longer cycle, with book 3 prefacing an intermission. The real action on the grand epic scale is clearly to come.