Victhor The Viking

A great review of one of my all time favorite books Anathem.  I hope this wins the Hugo Award.

Anathem is a hugely ambitious book that does indeed fail in some of what it’s trying to do. Where it succeeds it succeeds so brilliantly that I don’t care whether the physics makes sense or even whether there are any female characters. What Anathem is attempting is to write about the whole development of science and philosophy in a world similar but different from ours, and then extend it forward from here to cover four thousand more years of future. He does this in a way that’s utterly immersive and absorbing—in the first person point-of-view of an appealingly obsessive geeky young man. Stephenson sets up the world of the Maths, closed communities of geek-minded people who take themselves out of the world in the manner of monasteries, but instead of worshipping God they’re withdrawing to study abstract science. He makes this absolutely fascinating and absorbing with detail piled on detail—the one year Maths, the ten year ones, the century ones, the mysterious Millenial ones that only open once a century, and did I mention that the monasteries are also giant clocks that have to be wound?—and then he tells a first contact story set in that world. But the main thing the book is doing is showing how science itself works, the scientific method, and how that is in itself exciting and engaging and fun. That’s a real achievement.

Read the rest of the Review at  Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / 2009 Hugo Best Novel Nominee Spotlight: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson.

Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors of all time.  When hearing of his early-onset Alzheimer’s it made me extremely sad.  I am not a people person at all but this guy writes books that make me laugh out loud when I am reading them.

If someone wants to die they should have a right to do so.  This idea of someone not being allowed to take their own laugh is based in a Judeo-Christian (a disease on the face of the earth) society and the thought that suicide is a sin.  Fuck that.  I would want to die if I am going to be burden on those around me.  And if someone II love is suffering and asks me to help them move beyond the veil I would do it in a heartbeat because I know deep down in my heart that there is no fucking hell, no judgment, and no god that is going to punish me.

By placing human qualities on god we are limiting the nature of death itself.  Who knows what happens after death.  Certainly not the douchingtons who wrote the bible, because they were not dead!  I only wish they were dead so they wouldn’t written the damn thing to begin with.  Only the dead know what happens after death and I think it is probably beyond our comprehension.

Many Hailz to Terry Pratchett, may he live the rest of days in happiness and die with iPod in hand.

We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn’t get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive…

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod – the latter because Thomas’s music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven – and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

(Image: Terry Pratchett, Powell’s, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Firepile’s Flickr stream)

via Terry Pratchett on the right to die – Boing Boing.