Yakoob on 2/1/2015 at 04:40

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Oi thanks, just put a hold on it at my Library :)

Tocky on 4/1/2015 at 05:40

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Been reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes by King most recently. I'm near certain I've read it before but when your mind goes you get to reread stuff for the first time. Before that I read Zombies edited by John Skipp in prep for the zombie run in Tupelo which was a hoot, got my pic in a couple of papers for doing makeup for folks and suff, fake nails as teeth, false eyes and viens and such. Anyway, the first short story is Lazerus by Leonid Andreyev. Holy entropy is it bleak. It claws you to the abyss. I don't like to think of the futility of it all ordinarilly but he made it so interesting.

I read Dune so long ago nicked. The series sort of peters out after about the fourth one or so or it did for me. God Emperor or something. Dune was great though. They referenced it in the movie about the flying ball in the mortuary that I can't think of just now made in the seventies. Christ that's been a long time. Memorable book though.

Tocky on 5/1/2015 at 03:02

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The very one. I don't know that it counts because I've been doing more collecting of them than reading but I've gotten into Weird Tales, Startling Stories, Amazing Stories, and Planet Stories. Some of my favorite authors, Bradbury, Dick, Bloch, Blackwood and the like, got their start on those old 30's-50's pulps. The covers are pure art as well but so very fragile it's like reading something at the Library of Congress with tongs.

Anyway, it's good to be seen. Finally camped at Elkmont on the last trip. Beautiful places rotting sweetly along a mountain stream made more hauntingly so by the knowledge they will soon be memory. Go visit while you still can. I suggest fall, after the crowds, when the rangers turn their backs to exploration.

demagogue on 6/1/2015 at 05:10

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For the record, the original Stalker novel (Roadside Picnic) is a cool little story. It reads fast (in English), and if you've played the game you can see what they were thinking. Here's the text if anyone wants a quick read: (http://www.lib.ru/STRUGACKIE/engl_picnic.txt)

The book makes more sense than the game really, because the artifacts were left by alien visitors, and we understand some more than others, and some are completely baffling. But trying to understand them is like trying to understand the alien thinking, which you don't get in the game.

So my thumbnail theory is -- and I know this isn't very original or insightful -- but like US scifi of the 60s and 70s it's written in the context of the Cold War and nuclear brinkmanship, and I see the zones and artifacts as potential discoveries science can make, some of which may be useful, but a lot of them may make things much worse, and it'd be a bad idea to take them out of the zone into the normal world, where they don't belong.

I mean the message I got was just because we can discover it (eg nuclear power), even though it's great to increase our understanding, but it doesn't mean it belongs here and we have to put it to use. But, being human, we can't help the draw of wanting to bring them in and put them to some use anyway. The responsible scientists vs the opportunistic stalkers symbolize just that tension between understanding vs exploitation.

Yakoob on 26/2/2015 at 08:37

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BLASTO FROM THE PASTO, but I just read it and wish I realized sooner it was a series.

I really liked the begiinning and maybe the first third, but then it gets overly meandering. The premise is superb, the mysteries are interesting, and the cast of characters is interesting. But each time things pick up it feels like there is a 50 pages of complete going in circles. The whole Sam Clemen's riverboat building saga would just go on forever and end exactly where it started he lost the boat anyway, back to square one. I don't think I can stomach more of this just to learn what is really going on.

TL;DR book would be amazing if half the chapters were cut out.