I’ll admit that my first exposure to Le Guin’s work was the awkward and often painfully boring Sci Fi adaptation of Earthsea, which incidentally was blasted by the author herself in the article A Whitewashed Earthsea, How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books. This article did not appear on my radar until very recently so I was under the impression for the past year that Le Guin might possibly suck as bad as that mini-series did so it was with great relief that she felt the same about Legend of Earthsea as many SciFi viewers. Having finished Worlds of Exile and Illusion I am solidly convinced of her abilities to tell a compelling story and draw characters that have depth, meaning and a tangible sense of humanness.
World of Exile and Illusion is a compendium of three novellas originally published in the 1960’s and comprise the first works of the Ekumen series. Each story is a distinct tale largely separate from the others, though, they are bound to the same universe and fictional backdrop and occasionally share small details for the sake of continuity. What I found most fascinating was that the tales are dressed in the pretense of science fiction–interstellar travel, galactic intrigue and war, and highly advanced technologies and civilizations–but in their telling are more akin to high fantasy in that the protagonist struggles in lands of rudimentary technology among civilizations that are mired in feudalism to attain a goal that impacts the world as a whole. The cycle progresses from an individual ripped from his technology, to one struggling to remember its far distant cultural achievements, to the last, which turns the first story on its head, where the protagonist has no recollection of who he is or where he came from. Le Guin put a great deal of care into portraying all characters and cultures with a great deal of sensitivity offering valid motivations for action and behavior, enough so that I found myself wistfully thinking that an anthropological companion would make a nice addition to her work in this series.
If I have one complaint is that the book ends so abruptly, one Amazon reviewer put it nicely by saying, “Did Ursula run out of paper? or typewriter ribbon?” Upon reflection it does make sense in that throughout each story reminds the reader that the impact of time in interstellar travel is greater than the distance itself so that the journey of the character in the last story does in fact signal the end of his presence and, very likely, the memory of him on that planet. The trouble is that the endings come at such a breathless pace in contrast with their often languid and relaxed beginnings leaving me feeling slightly disorientated at the story’s close.
Minor quibbling aside, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a good story. Irregardless of whether or not you like science fiction or fantasy or dislike both the book is well written, and the characters and their worlds are portrayed with sensitivity and detail which are the prerequisites for excellent fiction. I will be looking forward to reading more of Le Guin’s work and am glad that it bears no resemblance to the hatchet job that appeared on Sci Fi.
As reported on Yahoo! News, scientists have worked out how bees fly.
“The honeybees have a rapid wing beat,” Altshuler told LiveScience. “In contrast to the fruit fly that has one eightieth the body size and flaps its wings 200 times each second, the much larger honeybee flaps its wings 230 times every second.”
“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”
Continuing to prove that ID is just sheer laziness.
The post-holiday poverty season has Management and I looking to stretch our food budget little further than usual–read: we eat leftovers more often–so we are always in search of new and flavorful recipes–read: easy but tasty–we can try out. Last night we banged one together by modified a recipe for Chicken Soup and Shepard’s Pie from the Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes and Garden cookbook. It is built around layering flavors, starting with onions, garlic, celery, and carrots, an finishing off with an assortment of spices and herbs. Since it is a one pot meal it is a meal that you can prepare early and let cook most of the day without fuss or worry. We have a 2 qt Round French Oven from Le Creuset that we use for this but any enameled stoneware (range top and oven safe only) or cast iron oven would work well with this since the need is for all around heat.
Chicken Shepard’s Soup
- (1) Small onion, diced
- (2) Cloves of garlic, cracked and chopped
- (2) Large carrots, sliced
- (2) Large stalks of celery, sliced (I actually prefer to use the inner most parts of the celery bunch, leaves and all, for this since it seems to have the most flavor for cooking.)
- (1) Large potato, cubed
- (1/2) cup of frozen corn
- (1/2) cup of frozen peas
- (1) Chicken breast cut into chunks
- (16 oz) of low-sodium chicken stock
- (1) Bay leaf
- (1) Tablespoon of hot paprika
- (1) Teaspoon of ground coriander seed
- (4) Pinches of dried rosemary
- (4) Pinches of dried thyme
- Fresh cracked black pepper to taste
- Salt to taste
- (3) Tablespoons of olive oil
Add the olive oil and bay leaf to the French oven and bring them up to medium-low heat on the range–bubbles should form about the bay leaf. When it is up to heat add the onions, garlic, celery, and carrots and let them sweat for approximately 10 minutes or until the onions start to become translucent. Follow this by adding the potato and half of each of the spices and herbs and stir and let cook for another 10 minutes and preheat the oven to 250° F.
When the oven is ready take the pot off the stove and stir in the remaining vegetables and chicken broth. Layout the pieces of chicken on top of the vegetables and dust them with the remaining herbs and spices. Cover and bake for approximately 2-2 1/2 hours and let cool for a few minutes before serving. We had this with cornbread made in a cast iron skillet, which when mixed with a couple of small pieces of butter goes a long way in keeping the bread moist and firm–I hate dry crumbly cornbread.
As we continue our kitchen experiments I’ll post some of the successes as well as some of the disasters as a warning of what to avoid!
I’m continuing to trawl the Internet for details about Sony’s new eBook device when someone over at Engadget in the comments posted the obvious link to the official web page for the features of the Sony Reader. Pure genius to actually look at the official website. So this is what they are saying:
- Size and Weight - 6.9” by 4.9” by .5” and 9 ounces
- 6-inch screen (measured diagonally)
- 64 MB RAM for storage
- Optional Memory stick or SD card for additional storage
- Battery life is equal to 7,500 continual page turns (Translation: Potential for a whole lot of flipping)
- Charges in less than 4 hours
- It also displays PDFs, personal documents (.txt?), blogs, newsfeeds, and JPEGs
It is worth noting that any webcontent such as RSS and possibly HTML will likely need to be converted to BBeB so I’m not entirely sure what that will mean for the Linux and Mac crowd though there is a Librie Group on Yahoo that has some tools available for converting to BBeB. Also, if the above picture is any indication of the screen quality I am sold.
Engadget posted the first pictures of Sony’s new eBook reader for the North American market and while it is a touch fugly at least they dropped the keyboard; plus the screen looks nice and clear! Now, they just need to clarify whether or not I can load my own content on it via services such as Fictionwise and Project Gutenberg or if it will be the usual Sony Crippleware®.
One of the things that I abhor about end of the year lists are the gems that slip between the cracks or are only realized after the “Top Albums” have been codified. Dark Light In The Wake of Silence is one such gem and was tipped off by its humble creator in a thread on eMusic’s message boards who had just noticed that it had been added to the service’s available albums. This is an album that by all rights would have passed under my nose without me taking much of a second glance having been buried under some 300+ new releases and originally misclassified as New Age Ambient–not a genre I dive into very often.
Dark Light In The Wake of Silence is a pensive album that fuses elements of Middle Eastern and North African musical traditions to Western concepts of rhythm and harmony. Each song is stitched to the next in a long billowing collage of movement, there are moments of rest but as a whole the album moves like a ceaseless engine of sound and texture. The first comparisons that leapt to mind as I listened to it for the first time were the moodiness of Amon Tobin, the expansiveness of both DJ Cheb I Sabbah and Natacha Atlas, and tempered by the Arabic Pop styling of Cheb Mami. Knossos has created a truly world spanning album.
On Knossos’ website, the composer describes the music and the process as thus:
[A]n instrumental excursion into the heart of world fusion; assembling post-rock sensibility with the complexity of IDM, D&B and Abstract electronica. Featuring a myriad of eastern instruments in an environment blurred with ambient guitar clusters, electronic glitch, and dense rhythmic intensity.
It is an apt description and its realization is well executed though my only complaint is that on occasion the most delicate and often most interesting passages played on the stringed instruments are swallowed up in the mix. While the notion of decomposing the work into less discrete passages of ambient and soundscapes there is, for me at least, a perceptible loss of the original vision. However, stepping slightly farther back from the work and can be heard that Knossos is creating a future perception of traditional works and in that they succeed.
Ruhsuz, while shedding many of the layered effects found in many of the songs, conveys the concept of tradition as seen through futurism by using an infectious hook that sounds most at home on a clear night under an expansive sky but is bound tightly to sharp drum programming. The result is a song the evolves from a bare structure of melody and rhythm into a passionate dance piece. Similarly, Unknown To The Sea has an oud and bass playing counterpoint all awash in pink noise and soft pads further blurring the lines between what should be yesterday and tomorrow.
If Dark Light In The Wake of Silence is any indication of Knossos’ talent and vision I will certainly be eagerly anticipating their next release. Highly recommended.
