Book Blog

An update on what I've been reading recently, covering World War II, Science Fiction and the Grand Canyon. I finally finished my copy of Rick Atkinson's Pulitzer-winning book An Army At Dawn, the first in his ongoing Liberation Trilogy. I had started the book a long time ago, when I was in college, but for whatever reason, I'd never gotten around to finishing it. This time around, I was able to get through the whole thing, although it is a bit of a dense read. However, the book is chock full of details about the North African Campaign of 1942, from the beginning of the war, where the origins of the invasion were first explored, to the final battles when the German and Italian forces were driven off of the continent. This book isn't written in a vacuum either - all aspects of the campaign are explored in vivid detail. The logistics, politics, tactics, the soldiers on the front, and more is looked at over the course of the entire segment of the Second World War, one that hasn't really been explored to the extent to which other battles have been. By far, this is the best book that I've read about the African campaign during WWII.

The next book that I picked up is a new one from Adam Roberts, called the History Of Science Fiction. This is a field that holds great interest for me - and this book certainly explores the course that Science Fiction has taken - in this case, since the Ancient Greeks. This book was a little mixed for me. While it holds an incredible amount of information on the field, it's a little densely written - this book is more academic than other books that I've looked at, such as Geeks, Gangsters and the Men of Tomorrow, but it's still a fairly accessible read. Robert's main thesis concerns the changes in Science Fiction dating back to the split between Catholicism and Protestantism, between I and It and humanity (soft scifi) vs science (hard sci-fi). The thesis is interesting, but I'm not wholly won over by his arguments to this. The historical content here is in depth and fascinating. Exploring various definitions of Science Fiction based on what numerous critics have come up with, and tracing the roots of the genre since the Ancient Greeks, further expanding the field. However, it's once we reach the late 19th - 20th century with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells that the story really picks up and gets interesting, going through the golden age, new wave and modern science fiction. Once up to the 1990s, the pace drops off and seems much more constrained to the real contemporary items. Authors such as Alistair Reynolds, Ben Bova, Nancy Kress, Ken McLeod, Charles Stross, Karen Traviss and Richard Morgan are either mentioned briefly or not at all, while Science Fiction TV, is passed over with little mention at all, with only the new Battlestar Galactica really talked about. Other shows, such as Babylon 5, the various Star Treks, Stargate SG-1, Firefly and several others have had huge impacts on the field of science fiction, and by and large, media tie-ins aren't really discussed. Furthermore, the impact of fan groups isn’t discussed in too much detail either. Overall, it's a good read, but some aspects of discussion were a bit of a letdown, particularly with the 1990s. However, the passages that cover the 1930s through the 1970s are very well done.

Finally, the last book that I've finished recently was entitled How The Canyon Became Grand, a short read on the cultural and scientific history on the Grand Canyon, from the earliest encounters from explorers to today. The book is a fascinating read, one that covers a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from science, art, exploration and society. The canyon, fittingly, is the result of several geologic events coming together: the rise of the Colorado Plateau, the earlier deposition and depression of seafloor sediments and the Colorado River flowing during the uplift. Like its creation, the canyon lies at a number of intersections of American culture, helping build the United States Geological survey, becoming a corner stone of western exploration and now tourism and the National Park Service. This is explored as a perennial American creation, as the views of the canyon first appear as an impediment to exploration, a blemish on the landscape, to one of sheer beauty and majesty.

All Hell Breaks Loose

I just got back from seeing the film Cloverfield, which came out on the 18th of January. I have a couple of mixed feelings about it, but overall, I think that it was an absolutely facinating film, one that I feel will really change the way that films are made. The story, in case you haven't seen the film or haven't heard anything about it, is almost non-existent, all filmed from the point of view of Hud, the best friend of Rob, who's about to leave for Japan to become the Vice President of something. We start off with some clips of Robert and Beth, from something that was taped over about a month before. We then go to a party, where we're introduced to various people, some of whom are caught up in what happens next. There's a huge tremor, the lights go out and panic everywhere. People go up to the roof to see what happened and while up there, there's an explosion, and more panic. The rest of the movie documents a small group of four as they try and escape from the city. As they run, we get glimpses of the monster as it destroys buildings and drops smaller creatures that attack people. Rob gets a phone call from a girl, which drives much of the film from there as he and the other three people tag along as they try and get to her. A couple people are picked off. Rob's brother Jason is killed when the Brooklyn Bridge is destroyed by the monster, and one of the girls is bitten by a smaller creature and explodes shortly after they reach a makeshift Army base. Another gets onto a helicopter and escapes, and so on. Overall, there's not much to the story here, but really, a story isn't needed. Rather, we just see part of the story, but only from this one point of view, and the characters make us aware of this as they document what happens. This movie is a product of the post 9-11 and YouTube world, where anything can be documented on a camera phone or a digital camcorder, which translates into a lot of footage of the world around us. While I was watching this, I was really reminded of a bit of combat footage that some soldier caught in Fallujah, Iraq. This film keeps much of the same intensity and single-minded focus that really just gives us one piece of what is a larger event that the main characters are caught up in. The approach is brilliant, and I can't think of a more simple and interesting way to come up with a story such as this. All we see are the four main characters, as they literally run for their lives. This is a monster movie that's not about the monster, but about these mid-twenties kids who are witness to this incredible event. There's no explanation, no scientist that drones about how this came from who-knows-where, and there isn't much that we do learn. The group runs into an army group, and from what we hear from them is that they're just as in the dark as we are, except that they know that victims who've been bitten are not good (messy explosion, and probable contamination, hence the Hazmat suits), and that they have permission to shoot it. Hud, our camera man, speculates that it's from the ocean, or a government experiment. (Look at the end of the film, when there's part of a taped over section with Roger and Beth, in the corner of the ocean, you see something fall from the sky and into the ocean. Hm...) But overall, it doesn't really matter where this thing came from. There's the big version that's destroying buildings and playing baseball with the statue of liberty, and there's smaller things that seem to fall off of it that move much faster and attack people nearby. There's no time for explanation here. Just running and more running. Hud, at some point, realizes that documenting what happens here will possibly make their ordeal worth something. This comes right from this generation, with the ability to film something. The footage that we get is remarkably like homemade films from soldiers in Iraq in the middle of battle, with much of the intensity here. The events are preserved, and technology, both in capture and then distribution, have made this a practical thing for a huge group of people. Given the events of 9-11, with the images of dust-covered survivors and rubble strewn streets, this film is a direct product in theme and style. It's not too unbelievable that there would be (and probably are) a number of films shot by regular people about the events of 9-11. This is that same logic to much more fantastic proportions. With these two things put together, there's a highly successful, out of the box film here that is really something to watch. While not terribly original by any stretch of the imagination (Monster attacks city; panic ensues - this has been done to death. No pun intended.), it's a fresh look at the genre. The monster, when we do see it, is interesting, frightening and not really like anything seen before. What really makes this film work is the unknown - we don't see the monster that often, and we don't know much else about it. I think that over explanation here would have rendered much of this film useless. Already, the film has done spectacularly well at the box office - it made #1 at the box office by a large margin, and remained there for a little while, all the while this film was made for a fairly low budget. As of the time of this writing, there's already talk of a second movie (I'd hesitate to call it a sequel). This could be done really easily - there were several other people that we come across in the film who are also holding cameras. At the beginning of this film, there's an official looking seal that states that the footage is one of many recovered from the city after the event (Designated as Cloverfield), so further films aren't an improbability here. The only issue would be making sure that any future effort isn't simply a rehash of this movie - a group of kids merely running away from the monster. Future films, while retaining similar filming styles, should incorporate completely different people and catch different views of the event. I can see a video from some of the military personnel filling this void, or from medical or rescue personnel. A collection of films, all with different viewpoints of the Cloverfield event, would together tell the entire story. It's an interesting possibility, and one where I think is just begging to happen. Sequels here don't need to coincide too much with the first film, nor do they need to be wholly consistent with characters or events, just overlapping at a couple of points here and there.

Writing Slate

So, I've been doing a bit of independent projects with history since I've graduated, both centered around the history of Camp Abnaki. I started this summer with archiving a lot of the records and sorting them out in house, and from there, I embarked on two projects:

1 - Comprehensive History of Camp Abnaki. This is going to be an extremely long-term writing project, given the scope of what I'm trying to do. Rather than just writing a history paper that essentially goes from point A to B to C to D, this project is going to look at the history of Abnaki in the context of 20th century history - how major events such as the stock market crash, the first and second world wars, the cold war, outbreak of flu, the 1960s and how attitudes towards child care have been changing since 1901. This is going to take me a long time to finish, and it's currently on the back burner due to it's size and due to the next project:

2 - The life of Byron Clark. This paper's in a more complete form now, standing at 25 pages, with probably another ten or so to be written. I've just gotten Clark's journal, which I'm working on translating from cursive to a regular text file. However, in order to finish this in time, I'm going to have to forgo some of the translating and pick out sections where needed. I currently have one feeler out for a presentation at a historical conference in April, and I'm hoping to get this published (it will probably need to be edited down.) I've also currently put out requests for editing from three PhDs that I know.

3- Norwich University and the Invasion of Normandy. This was my thesis paper for my senior year at Norwich, and while I completed it for the course, topping out at 38 pages (50 with maps and sources), I'm not at the point where this is finished for me. I need to visit the National Archives and pull unit records for various infantry and armored divisions, which I found to give incredibly detailed information on the going-ons of the campaign. This is something that I'd love to get published someday.

4 - The Class the Stars Fell On - this is going to be my next project, and I'm going to start it right after I finish with my Byron Clark Paper. I came across the reference earlier this weekend when I finished Rick Atkinson's An Army At Dawn (FINALLY), when he mentioned that the American Military Academy (West Point) class of 1915 numbered 162 graduates. Out of that class, 59 were made general, two of them reaching the highest rank possible, five stars (Eisenhower and Bradley). Following that, there were two 4-star generals, seventy-three 3-stars, twenty four 2-stars and twenty four 1-stars. The intent it to examine what role this class played in the world following their graduation and why this class was so extraordinary - no class since has graduated as many people who obtained the rank of General. This will probably be a long project as well - possibly book length. I know that there's a lot of information, particularly about the more visible members of the class, such as Eisenhower and Bradley, but I'm going to need to research a lot of other people, to see what they were up to. I'm excited for the prospect of this project, and I suspect that it'll take me a bit longer than I'd like because I'll be starting my Masters in March, although maybe this can be a part of it.

Statement of Intent

So, I'm enrolled in grad school now - Masters of Military History at the Norwich University School of Graduate Studies. I'm excited. This is why I want to do this:

It is my intention to complete the Masters in Military History program to fulfill several personal and professional goals in life. While participation in the School of Graduate Studies is a requirement for employment, the Military History program is closely in line with my own personal interests, while the online format will provide valuable experience for the various directions that education will trend towards in the future.

When I was in high school, I picked up a book about the Attack on Pearl Harbor after watching a film about the attack, to see what was historically accurate. This led to other books about the second World War, about the Pacific Theater, D-Day, and more, sparking an interest in history that would lead my interests into other parts of world history and to achieve a degree in the subject from Norwich University.

It was at Norwich University that my interest in history matured to the point where I could find a career and livelihood. During my senior year at the school, I started a research project on the Norwich University alumni who fought in Operation Overlord, completing a paper and a chapter of Norwich history. Shortly after the paper was finished, I was able to travel to Normandy to tour the battlefields, which has only further cemented my interest in military history.

During my career at Norwich, as an undergraduate, I tried to distance myself from most aspects of military history because of the over-enthusiastic interest from my classmates, and the desire to study other aspects of history that were relatively untouched and therefore, new. From that background, I was able to approach my study in a far better way, in context and in depth.

I plan to take my studies at Norwich as further refinement of my methods and knowledge in the field for the future – I intend to obtain a PhD in history, and I have found that military history is a field that is particularly useful in the field, as there are a number of influences in the peripheral subjects. Indeed, with a subject that deals with such confusing and convoluted subject matter, study of it makes for excellent practice and a better understanding of the world in which we live.

Geek Weekend

It seems like it's a really appropriate way to end the week - a convention. This weekend, I'm not only attending Arisia Con, a big SciFi/Fantasy convention down in Cambridge, Mass, but I'm also going to a show of Spamalot in Boston with Sam and Miranda, two good friends of mine, who, like me are very geeky.

The con and show seem like the perfect way to cap off the week, which in and of itself has had a good share of geek-related things. First up, there was the Texas UFO sightings. Extraterrestrial or not, it's a fun news story that the media has picked up and run with.

This past week, I've also begun a major project with the 501st, tracking each major event and troop that will be held world-wide. It's a small project that's been growing each month, now to the point where I've put myself in contact with the heads of each garrison, as well as the PR officers. Hopefully, I'll be e-mailed regularly with events, which I've started plotting on a google calendar, and from there, I've been reporting the events to the legion in a weekly list that covers events for the rest of the month. It's fascinating to see what's going on. This weekend, there's six different events world-wide. And I'm sure that this list is going to grow as more people get back to me. Already, events are plotted all the way to December.

Back to this weekend, it'll be great to get the armor back on with the NEG. I've been looking forwards to it for a while since I attended the Woburn Parade back in October. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go to the convention in November, but I'm hoping to go to the Science Meets Imagination Opening in Penn. in February and the Boston St Patrick's Day Parade in April. March is the scheduled release for the film Fanboys, which there's been some talk about going to the opening in armor. Of course, there's also been some talk about boycotts because of some recent changes that might be made to the film.

Recently, I've been looking at the phenomenon of fandom more and more closely. Not just Star Wars fandom, which I'm most familiar with, but with the interactions of fans and material in the Science Fiction and Fantasy realm since the mid-1920s. When I was in London, I wrote a paper on the history of fandom in the UK, and came across some really interesting things, mainly with the history of fan clubs, real grass roots stuff. And I realize, looking at my education and overall goals in life, this is the types of things that I'd love to study, research, write and teach. It's a huge part of American, and even Western culture. Maybe someday...

Right Outta Science Fiction

I swear, I did a double take when I saw this headline in the New York Times yesterday morning:

F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe

After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe to eat, clearing the way for milk and meat derived from genetic copies of prized dairy cows, steers and hogs to be sold at the grocery store. Well, I'm glad that's been cleared up for everyone ... just when are we expecting to have a huge influx of cloned cattle anyway? I have no issues with cloned food, and I'm somewhat amused by the chatter that I've heard about it on the radio - there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the idea of cloned food. Wait, huh?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word clone is defined as the following:

1 (biology) a plant or an animal that is produced naturally or artificially from the cells of another plant or animal and is therefore exactly the same as it.

Let me emphisize the phrase "Is therefore exactly the same as it". That means that any cloned animal would be the same - exactly the same - as it's predecessor. I highly doubt that anyone is paticular about the exact animal that their food comes from - does beef taste different from animal to animal? I haven't noticed anything. Currently, cloning is a technology that's in the works. I remember when Molly the sheep was cloned and we had Dolly the sheep. Since then, there's been a bunch of other animals that have been since cloned. This current regulation from the FDA saying that cloned food will be safe is a huge step towards cloned food being sold on a larger scale. If anything, this could be an extremely good thing for consumers. Quality food sources or breeding lines could be targeted so that the overall quality of the food is higher. Consumers are already used to uniform food in just about everything else, from soup to cereal and pretty much everything else that comes in a package - this would just essentially bring about uniformity with perishables. Obviously, safeguards will be needed to ensure the cloning processes don't have any unforeseen effects - this is new technology after all. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy will lose out over time, and who's to say that this won't happen with any cloning process.

But, I'm willing to bet that if food were to be unlabeled as cloned, people wouldn't even notice the difference.

NYTIMES Article

Transcriptions

Back in December, I received a digital copy of Byron Clark's journal - a goldmine of information on my subject - dates, thoughts, and details that I didn't really have a good grasp on before. There are 659 high quality images that makes up the entire journal, with a number of images, hand-written notes and news paper articles. Currently, I'm transcribing the entire thing. I'm finding that it's the best way for me to understand the sequence of events that occurred at camp, and what Clark was thinking. So far, I've transcribed about nineteen pages of handwritten text, from the beginning of the first camping session to just after. It's absolutely astounding to what information is in those pages, about that first camping session, about the foundation upon which a lot of my life has essentially been based on. There's a bunch of things that I knew about, but mostly just general things. Here was specific, day by day information about the first camping session, with some things that really stood out. For example, I was unaware that the frist campers started a secret society, and that five of the campers were kicked out towards the end for stealing 30 bananas. I think that I'd be able to finish my paper without this, but it would be severely diminished. Fortunately, I was able to obtain a digital copy of this, which brings me to my next point - digital copies of physical documents is going to be an essential tool for researchers as technology and access developes further. Currently, the main problem with this is the sheer volume of materials that do not exist as a digital copy. Currently, according to an article in Seven Days, there's efforts underway for high resolution scans for some of the state's older documents, like the State Constitution. A couple months ago, I tried looking into getting mission reports for various Infantry and Armored divisions for D-Day to work on my Normandy paper a bit more, to no avail - according to the man I spoke with, there are just too many mission reports and files in hard copy, that the process will take years, if not decades of dedicated work. Another person I spoke with about military files stated that an entire repository was destroyed by fire a couple years ago - raw information that is lost forever. The advantages of digital scanning and replication are clear - it allows, first and foremost, a backup copy, something that really hasn't been available to historians before. Originals of documents, barring extraordinary cases, don't last the long, and are susceptible to changes in heat, temperature, humidity and human interactions. A digital copy would practically eliminate that, provided that a secure digital filing system can be perfected. (From what I have read and understand, there's no sure way to store digital information, something that, interestingly, the film industry is currently up against when storing film data files.) Additionally, digital copies make distribution of documents and files much, much easier, either via online databases such as JStor or similar sites, or on a user to user basis. There's an entire industry here, as these sites aren't free, and are generally used by universities and institutions. The main downside is probably going to be an ongoing argument regarding the nature of information and its distribution via the internet. Should information be completely free? And if historical documents are brought to the digital world, who will control it? The company or institution that does the scanning and storing? I can see this opening up some problems for researchers. What is to prevent institutions from selectively releasing information to researchers to alter histories? While the government has laws that allow for transparency (which should help military historians), I'm not aware of any such laws that could operate with the private sector. That being said, digital copies would also make historian's lives easier, because it really doesn't help when you need physical copies, and they're 7-10 hours away by car.

Charlie Wilson's War

I finally got to watch the latest film from Participant Productions, Charlie Wilson's War. While the company has had a fairly good track record with political movies, such as Syriana or Good Night and Good Luck, this movie represents a downturn in quality, which is unfortunate, as I had some high hopes for this film.

I don't know too much about the background history here - I only have one book on Afghanistan, which I've been looking over a little to check some of the events. From what I have read, however, this film is largely self-contained in a historical vacuum, something that's never good when trying to get a historical concept across. The movie presents a fairly simple, straightforward story of how a congressman from Texas helped push the Soviet military out of Afghanistan.

The first half of the film does accomplish this to a fairly good extent while building the character of Charlie Wilson. We see how he's a womanizer and one who loves his alcohol, and that he seems to be fairly lost in what he really wants in life, until he sees a news report from CBS news about the Afghani fighters. After a trip to Pakistan, Charlie Wilson finds his cause in life, to arm and equip the resistance fighters in the country to repel the Soviet military. At this point, he meets up with a rough CIA agent named Gust, who's in charge of the region, along with 'three other guys'. It's determined that Wilson is at the proper point in the government to funnel a lot of money into the cause.

This first part works fairly well. One of the things that I was really looking forwards to about this movie was the fact that Aaron Sorkin was the screenwriter here. I've recently become enamored of his work with the West Wing, and was hoping for something along the same lines, just with even bigger faces. This comes across at times with his dialog, but for large sections of the film, I never got the sense that this was even touched by Aaron Sorkin.

Historically, there are issues here. From what I've read, there was a lot more money going into the country. They do get other things right, such as where they got the weapons, from Israel and Egypt. Even some of the international relations regarding Pakistan are addressed. However here, we just get lip service to what is really an extremely complicated issue that's been boiled down for a movie-going public. Additionally, I suspect that there were a number of details that were sensationalized at various points, and I don't know if this comes from the book or from the film.

This first half of the film is where the interesting material stops. Once the story is set up with all of the various parts, (even despite a side story about Congressman Wilson being investigated for illegal drug use, which was completely unnecessary), the film goes to exposition, and largely done through stock footage from either newsreels or wartime footage, showing the successes of the Afghan forces against the superior Soviet tanks and helicopters. There's a paradigm in writing that says show, don't tell, which seems to have been the model here. Where it works in most places, it utterly fails here. We see what looks like extremely poor, video-game quality footage of what the Soviets are up to, as if we need to be reminded that they're the bad guys, and then later on image after image of the helicopters blowing up. Not only would this have been a bit better if the production crew had re-created those moments, this throws the pacing of the film out the window, jumping what seems to be months or even years between shots. The footage is poor and pulls the viewer right out of the film. Historical details aren't followed here either. On screen, there were only three helicopters, while in reality, on September 25th, 1986, when eight Hind gun ships were blown out of the sky, and was the first time that the Soviets suffered extreme losses at the hands of US armed rebels, with the new Stinger missiles, some of which are probably still in use today.

This leads to the main message of the film, which is brought to the audience's attention right at the end, when it's announced that the Soviet military has pulled out of Afghanistan and when people are trying to decide what to do with the country now. While a billion dollars were pumped into the effort (at least in the movie), they weren't willing to spend anything on schools or infrastructure. Furthermore, at the end of the film, we learn that fanatics have taken control of the capital, which would become the Taliban. Essentially, the film has pointed out that much of the problems were essentially created because the US didn't finish the job over there, which seems to have been a very common talking point over the past couple of years with the Iraq war.

This, to me, is a very clumsy attempt at political criticism, especially following two films that have done this very thing. Syriana, which followed the complex chain of politics, corruption, foreign oil and Islamic radicalism, did an absolutely fantastic job at weaving these issues into a complex, yet accessible story by looking at all of the storylines. This probably could have been done fairly well with Charlie Wilson's War, if one were to look at this film in more than just the vacuum that it's in as it is. Good Night and Good Luck, which was released the same year, also contained a lot of political commentary, government vs. free speech and the influence that governmental officials have in times of worry. While this took place in the 1950s, this film also contained a number of real-world parallels.

Charlie Wilson's War could have been the most relevant movie in this genre. The attempt at political commentary is too overt and clumsy, while the filming and acting distracted further. (Julia Roberts did a fairly poor job here, while Tom Hanks was a bit better. Philip Seymour Hoffman was easily the best actor of the three.) But to my eyes, the film seems to be extremely revisionism and reactionary, by pointing the finger at earlier politicians for blame, rather than examining this in the context of the entire chain of events. I highly doubt that fundamentalists attacked the United States because the US helped rid them of the Soviet military while not providing anything for services and rebuilding afterwards. No, this was just one piece of what's turned out to be a long chain of events in US-Middle East relations. The United States backing Israel, our actions during the first Iraq war and Saudi Arabia and more have contributed to this mess. I suspect that had these events not occurred, we still would have many of the same problems today. This is why history cannot be presented in a vacuum.

RIP - Arthur Harringon

I just received an e-letter from Norwich from the alumni office, something that they've recently started doing. While looking through the obituary list, I came across one name - Arthur Harrington - that I recognized.

Some of you might remember that I did my final thesis on Norwich alumni who fought at Normandy, France during D-Day. Of the 43 people that I was able to find, I was only able to speak with one, Arthur Harrington, who landed on Omaha Beach on D+0 H + 6.

He was assigned to the 5th Special Engineering Brigade, where he was tasked with linking up communications between the 1st Infantry Division and the 29th Infantry division. He landed on Easy One, under enemy fire.

D-Day was the only time that Harrington took fire. He spent the rest of the war on the beaches, tasked to another special communications group that helped coordinate communications between the various branches (Army, Army Air Corp, Navy and Coast Guard), while helping set up a port at Normandy to supply the soldiers fighting further inland.

Prior to the invasion, he was involved with the planning of Overlord by analyzing reconnaissance photographs to help place equipment. Just before that, he was stationed in Iceland.

When I spoke with him a little under a year ago, he was happy to speak with me about my work, and about his role in the invasion. He told me then that he would not likely live to see the school again, and sent me a package of some papers relating to D-Day for the library's special collections. I mailed him a copy of my final paper, and never heard back from him again. I gathered that he was fairly active where he lived in North Carolina. He was 89 years old.

His official obituary can be found here.

Reading List of 2007

The following list is the result of an experiment that I've been conducting over the past year. I've never really been sure of how many books per year I've been reading, so I started tallying up everything that I picked up and read this year in a list. Last year, I sort of noticed that I read only a single book over the summer, and only a couple over the fall, resolved to read more than I had. In total, I picked up and read 56 books, while there were two others that I only got through half before putting them aside for a while - I intend to finish them later on at some point.

Of those 58 books there was one alternate history, two biographies, twenty fantasy, twelve history, one mystery, three science related, thirteen science fiction and six Star Wars books. This surprised me a little, because I'm more of a science fiction person than I am a fantasy reader. (Granted, seven of the fantasy books were the Harry Potter books, which I re-read in about a week.) Some of these books were better than others. My personal favorites were as follows:

Matriarch, Karen Traviss - This is book four of Karen Traviss's fantastic Wess'Har War series.

Singularity Sky, Charles Stross - This is the first of two books in this universe, and was the first time that I finished the book - I'd started it years ago, but never got around to finishing it. This time, I really enjoyed the storylines, which I was better able to comprehend and put together. The writing's really good, and Stross is, to me, one of the best Science Fiction writers out there now.

Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan - This was a book that I'd been intending to read for years, and I really loved this book. It's almost like a darker, more violent Blade Runner, and is the first in a trilogy. Morgan is another brilliant Science Fiction writer out there now.

Ally, Karen Traviss - Book five of the Wess'Har Wars.

The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien - I picked this one up as a longtime Tolkien fan. It was a bit different than I expected, more of a tragedy. I'm not all that familiar with the Silmarillion, but this is one of the stories from it.

Victoria's Wars, Saul David - I picked this up on England, having been looking for a book that chronicled the actions of the English military, and this book was perfect, talking about their actions in the middle east, India, Africa and Asia. Extremely detailed and a gripping read.

Soon, I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman - This book was a quick read, but for someone who likes comic books and the TV show Heroes, this was perfect. It's a snapshot from this author's superhero world, except a little more flawed and better thoughtout, and an all around fun read. And humerous as well.

The Battle for the Falklands, Max Hastings - This was another aspect of English history that I'd been looking to read about more, the Falklands War, fought in the early 80s. Extremely detailed, a little dull, but very, very good.

Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross - This is the followup to Singularity Sky. Another really good Sci-Fi read.

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson - This was one of the social history books that I'd been wanting to read for a while now, and finally got a copy. This is a cool history about the Chicago World Fair and America's first serial killer. And, said killer was part of a Supernatural Episode.

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman - This was a really cool read - what if people completely vanished from the planet? Weisman looked at all the environmental impacts that people have had, while examining what would happen to all of the buildings and things like that.

The Prestige, Christopher Priest - I loved the movie, and this book is just as good, if a little darker.

Conduct Under Fire, John Glusman - Another fantastic history here, this one about the Pacific Theater and four American doctors who were POWs under the Japanese occupation of the Philipeens. This was a Colby award winner. In the Shadow of the Moon, Francis French - For a very long time, I've been looking for a history of the space program from top to bottom. I came across this while looking for things about the documentary by the same title. This is an incredibly detailed look at the Apollo mission, and is the second in the University of Nebraska's Outward Odyssey series on space flight.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch - This book came out last year and I finally got a copy, and it blew me off my feet. By far, the best fantasy book that I've read this year. Lynch is a master at storylines and characters, and creates an incredibly detailed and complex world here.

Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott lynch - This is Lynch's followup to his first book (this is the second of seven books), and he does a really good job with this one two. Instead of heists, we've got pirates. Fantasy pirates.

Broken Angels, Richard Morgan - Richard Morgan's followup to Altered Carbon, and this one is just as good - where the first one was more of a mystery, this one is more Military Science fiction, which is really cool to read.

Into That Silent Sea, Francis French - The first book in the Outward Odyssey series, this one's all about the first steps that humans take into space with the Russians and American's first successes and failures. Another fantastic book.

Republic Commando: True Colors, Karen Traviss - This was easily the best Star Wars book of the year, and by my favorite author, Karen Traviss. It was a pretty disapointing year for Star Wars on my end, and this one redeemed everything because we've got Clones and more complex stories about our favorite commandos.

Probability Moon, Nancy Kress - This was a complete impulse buy for me, something that I'd passed on years ago. If you're a Stargate fan, you might like this. It's a pretty quick read, socio-military science fiction, with some great fleet action and science here.

Six Frigates, Ian Toll - This was another book I'd been meaning to read for a little while now, and it's one of the better histories that I've read about the US Navy and the earlier years of the United States. It has a couple flaws, but overall, a really good history.

This year, I've got a good 14 or so books to start with. An Army At Dawn and The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson are two that I've been meaning to read for a little while now, I've got David Halberstam's last book, The Coldest Winter, about the Korean conflict that just came out, Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill (bonus points to the first person who can guess this guy's father is - he's a major author in the horror field), A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr, which I've wanted to read for a little while, and a really neat looking book by Adam Roberts called the History of Science Fiction. Among others - there's several more on my list. I know that I'm going to have a bunch of military history books to read, as I'll be starting my Masters degree in March, and I'm guessing that my reading time will go down substancially, but I'm hoping to read more books this year than last year. 60 to 70 maybe?

All in all, I purchased 73 books, of varying genres. Some I'd read before, some I read this year and some I have yet to read. I wonder what I'll come across in the coming year.

This year, I also found and downloaded a cool program, called BookBD, created by SpaceJock software, which has allowed me to catalog all of my books into a comprehensive library, by tracking titles, authors, publishers, editions, ISBNs, years and more, as well as allowing me to check out books and generally keep track of things. Much better than Excell, which I used before to keep track of things. Currently, I own 473 books (I've probably missed a couple here and there), and the entire collection is worth several thousand dollars, which shocked me. I also purchased a new set of bookshelves, which is now gracing my living room with my favorite books. There's still a bunch of improvised shelves and boxes with books here. I suspect that I'll need another couple sets of shelves before the year is out.

Movies of the Year

I think that two of the best movies that I saw this year were two that were released last year, to limited theaters, while being released gradually to the rest of the world - Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men. Both were astounding. Pan's Labyrinth is a highly original fantasy film, dark, and deep. The second is Children of Men, which is more towards the Science Fiction realm, which is another excellently done film. Both were done by mexican filmmakers, and along with a third film, Babel, the three directors considered their three films a sort of trilogy. Hopefully, they can replicate their success in the future. Of the 2007 films, I thought that this was a bit of a lackluster year, especially for Science Fiction and fantasy films.

An early favorite was the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale, which was a huges step up from the other Bond movies that I've seen. More energetic and more in the lines of the recent Bourne movies.

Hot Fuzz was another huge favorite of mine. I was a huge fan of Shaun of the Dead, which is one of my favorite comedies of all time, and this was from the same people, and while pretty different, was just as good. I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

300 was a guilty pleasure that I saw when that came out. Historically inaccurate, overblown and rediculous, but a really fun movie to watch.

This summer, my favorite was The Bourne Ultimatum, the recent film in that series, and hopefully the last. This film is just as good as the first two, a rarity in series, where all of the films as as good as the others. This one brings some of the best action scenes in the series, and really tied back to the first movie, and the second, while finishing off things nicely.

The best documentary that I saw this year was In The Shadows of the Moon, which chronicled the Apollo program in brief detail. I can't wait to get this when it hits DVD in February.

There were a bunch of really good comedies released this year - Superbad made me laugh my ass off the entire way through. Balls of Fury was also quite funny, although not quite as funny as the trailers, but still good. Hot Fuzz, of course, was another really good one.

I Am Legend was another really good movie that I made it out to see. That surprised me a little - it's not really a zombie film, more of a character film. It's not often that a film can be carried by just one person, and Will Smith pulled this one off nicely.

Another one that just came across was Stardust, which just came out on DVD. It's very funny, original, witty, and possibly the best fantasy movies that I saw all year.

A couple of disappointments for me was the Golden Compass, which really surprised me, because it was something that I was really anticipating. It wasn't a bad movie, but it didn't really live up to expectations like I'd hoped. Balls of Fury was another bit of a letdown, after the fantastic trailers that were released for it. It was certainly a hilarious movie, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped. Spiderman 3 was a huge disapointment for me, especially after the first two movies being some of my favorites. The Peter Parker emo dance scene just made it go downhill for me.

There were a bunch of movies that I wanted to see that I never got around to seeing - Gone Baby Gone, No Country for Old Men, Waitress, Zodiac, Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Sunshine, Death at a Funeral and the Darjeeling Limited. They all had interesting premises, actors that I liked or just looked good.

I'll be interested to see what 2008 brings along. There's a new Star Trek movie coming, which looks to be interesting. There's the second Batman movie coming, which looks to be fantastic from the trailers that I've seen. Iron Man is coming out in March, which looks like a step up for comic book movies. Cloverfield, Fanboys, Jumper, Indiana Jones, Prince Caspian, Wall-E, Valkyrie, and Hellboy.

Near-Hit?

I bought a newspaper the other day, and while reading it, came across an interesting column headline: Asteroid Could Collide With Mars, Scientists Say

According to the very brief article, this asteroid, called 2007 WD5, which was discovered in November, is calculated to pass very close to Mars. Earlier odds were given at 1-75 of an impact, but recent historical data on the asteroid's path have bumped that up to 1-25. The current prediction is that if this is the 1 in 25 chance, the asteroid will hit Mars on January 30th.

Those are close odds, like really, really, really close. If this was something coming towards Earth, I'd stock up on food and water and bring along my copy of Cormic McCarthy's The Road.

An asteroid is any object that's smaller than 600 miles across. The largest one, around that size, is called Ceres. Most asteroids orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Both plants have moons that are thought to be captured asteroids.

This isn't the first time that something's plowed into one of the planets - this is most likely a common occurance. One of the coolest asteroid impacts occured on one of Saturn's moons, Mimas. The crater, which was formed billions of years ago, has turned the moon to look almost exactly like the Death Star. In 1994, 21 fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy comet impacted Jupiter, creating huge impacts in the atmosphere, releasing an incredible amount of energy.

2007 WD5 is about the size of a football field. That doesn't sound too big, but it's something that could do a lot of damage to the planet - an imact from an object that size would have huge rammifications for the planet. The Meteor Crater in Arizona, was formed when an object a hundred feet in length, a third of the size of the one going towards Mars, hit Earth, leaving a crater a mile in diameter. The last time earth was hit is thought to be 1908, when an asteroid landed in an uninhabited area in Sibera, exploding several miles above the surface, causing widespread devestation. Currently, it's theorized that a 6 mile long asteroid is enough to cause a mass-extinction that would kill off the human race. 65 million years ago, a large asteroid hit what's now Mexico, and is believed to have played a large part in killing off the dinosaurs. An earlier asteroid impact at Permian-Cretasious bountry was larger, killing off 95% of the planet's life. 95% !

Overall, asteroid impacts are probably a fairly common occurence, when you take into account geologic time. (think big) The moon is pockmarked with major asteroid impacts that've left bright scars across the surface. Mars and Jupiter, who are closer to the asteroid belt, have probably been hit numerous times in their history. As I mentioned before, Earth has been hit before as well, and will probably be hit again. Currently, there are 200 known asteroids that pass over Earth's pathway around the sun. There's probably a lot more that we don't know about. If I remember correctly, our next near-hit will be around 40 years from now, when one will come close to the planet. I think this sort of thing should really put into focus the fragility of our planet. Life isn't something that should be taken for granted here - in the larger scheme of things, it hasn't been around long, only a billion years or so, and it's come very close to being erased, and that's just because nature's out to get us. A small thing like global warming is pretty good evidence that we can screw things up pretty badly on our own.

Despite all the doomsday and gloom surrounding these sorts of events (there's really nothing that upbeat about planetary extinction), 2007 WD5 (they have to find a better name for this rock) coming close to Mars and possibly hitting it is really interesting. Scientifically, it'll allow scientists at NASA and around the world to examine what will happen on a planet when a huge rock slams into it, and will be able to see it as it happens. I have no idea what it will mean for all the existing equipment that we have on the planet, such as Viking and the Mars Rovers. But, we do have weather satellites up there, and the amount of data that they'll be able to collect will be immense - planetary geologists will have a field day. This is all assuming that this isn't the 24 times that this asteroid will miss. I for one, will be following this with great interest.

In the meantime, let's have a marathon of Deep Impact, Armageddon, the latest craptacular SciFi movie of the month, and watch the skies.

An interesting, related sidenote - I got a copy of an article entitled An Asteroid Breakup 160 MYR ago As the Probable Source of the K/T Impactor, which came out in the August issue of Nature. It's really interesting, and talks about the place where the K/T boundry asteroid (the one from 65 million years ago), came from.

My Top 10 Moments in Star Wars 2007

This has been popping up on various blogs... 10- - Clone Wars Teaser Trailer This looks to be leaps and bounds better than the cartoons that were released earlier. I'll reserve judgment until I hear more, but there's potential here...

9 - Blue Harvest - The Family Guy Special I saw the early trailer for this and almost died - Family Guy as Star Wars? Stewie as Dark Vader? Absolutely fantastic.

8- Robot Chicken Star Wars Special Even better than the Family Guy version, this threw me on my ass laughing so hard.

7 - R2 D2 Mail Boxes & Postage Stamps None of these made it to Vermont that I could tell, but these were really cool to see pictures of all over the place.

6 - Death of Mara Jade While this year was pretty lackluster for books, the Legacy series has been interesting, and this seems to have been one of the major milestones with the characters - rarely is such a well known character killed off.

5 - 501st Podcast The 501st started with a podcast updating on events and happenings in the Legion. I'm addicted.

4 - Fanboys Trailer A movie about fans of a movie. This one looks just amazingly funny, especially around when the guys come across a Star Trek convention and oh yeah, Kristen Bell in Slave Leia garb.

3 - Republic Commando: True Colors Easily the best Star Wars book of the year. Karen Traviss is back, and with an even deeper view of the Clones. And, there's one more to go.

2 - Tournament of Roses Parade 2007 200 Canon-accurate storm troopers and officers all marching in step. Oh dear god, I wish I had been there to see that.

1 - 30th Anniversary Stars Wars has turned 30. And still going strong.

Paper Update

I have Dad Clark's journal! He's the guy who I'm writing a historical paper on - I've been working on for the past couple of months. This is a huge, huge breakthrough, because the original copy is for all intents and purposes, in accessible to me. (It's held by the camp, and the only time that I'd really be able to take a good look at it would be during regular office hours.) I've since been working with Jim Albright, one of the experts on camp history, and he had a copy of the journal, a collection of 659 pictures of each page in the journal. Now, I have a primary source, rather than a handful of secondary sources. The big drawback to this is that I now have several hundred pages to go through, almost all in cursive - it's going to take me a long time to go through it all, and it's most likely going to add on a huge number of pages to a paper that I'm already trying to keep the page count down on - I'm at 25, and I don't want to go over 30. Still, this is a huge wealth of information that will really put me into the early days of camp and right into Byron Clark's head, something that I really haven't been able to do that easily.

In the Event of Zombies - Proceed to Bethel Vermont

I just got back from the Science Fiction / Horror movie I Am Legend. I have to say it's probably one of the best movies out this year, especially in the Science Fiction or Horror genres. The movie, for those of you don't know, takes place three years after a global epidemic that wiped out almost 90% of the earth's population. One survivor, played by Will Smith, has eked out a living in a now abandoned New York City, along with his dog, Samantha. He drives around the city in expensive cars that are now abandoned, plays golf off of an abandoned aircraft carrier and hunts deer in Central Park and Times Square. Oh, and locks up his house and never goes out anywhere without his rifle, because those who weren't killed off by the virus have been turned into a sort of primitive zombie-vampire, who eat anything that they can find after nightfall.

From the beginning, I was reminded of a book that I read earlier this year, called The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. The book is based on a couple of premises - the first and foremost being about what would happen if everyone vanished - especially New York City. In the book, he presents some of the same things - the subways filling with water, roads falling into disrepair, wildlife returning to the places in which humans formerly lived and plant life springing up everywhere.

Here, the movie presents a fairly accurate vision of this sort of future - like Weisman suggests, the roads have fallen into disrepair, trees and grasses spring up everywhere, deer and lions have returned (or just escaped from somewhere), as well as the subways filling with water. However, unlike in Weisman's world, the tall skyscrapers are still standing tall, (Weisman suggests that they would topple with their foundations becoming waterlogged), the roads are still intact (it's suggested that they would collapse with the subways) and the entire eastern seaboard wasn't radioactive glass, suggesting that the nuclear reactors in the United States hadn't overheated and were destroyed without anybody to staff them.

The first half of the movie is outstandingly done - Smith's character goes about his day, alone with his dog in the city, talking to store dummies that he seems to have placed around in a couple of places that he frequents. He sends out a radio beacon to alert any other survivors that he's out there, to help them. In all likelihood, it's probably mostly for his own sanity, the hope that there is someone else out there. We can see that he's lonely. Some of the best scenes are the ones that are the quietest, looking over the abandoned city while Smith walks around.

In the times that he's not wandering around, we see that Smith has a lab in his basement, where he spends more of his free time working out a cure, based on the immunity that he seems to have against the virus.

It's not an easy feat to virtually carry a movie almost completely on the shoulders of one actor, but Smith really manages to pull it off, especially with the help of his dog, who accompanies him everywhere he goes. While a good proportion of the film takes place in 2012, we do see a couple of glimpses into the past, just prior to the outbreak and during the evacuation. In 2009, a scientist came up with a cure for cancer, with 10,009 human clinical trials. In another glimpse, we see that those trials had horrible side effects, with the virus mutating into something that turns people into a snarling beast that was burned by the sun - almost like rabies. Smith tries to get his wife and daughter out of Manhattan before it's cut off from the rest of the world - he was a colonel in the US Army, and he used his position to try and get them to safety.

The flashbacks are interesting, because the movie takes place afterwards, and there's little setup - the viewers are merely thrown into the mix, with little explanation. The setup's in the first half of the movie, where it works extremely well, and brings the viewer up to the second half, where the action takes over - Smith looses it when Sam is turned, and he tries to kill as many of the zombies as he can, when another pair of survivors turn up, telling him that they heard his message and stopped by as they were on their way to Bethel Vermont, where there is apparently a colony of survivors.

This is perhaps one of the better parts of the film, where Smith hears this news - his first reaction is to throw his dish across the room and shout. He plays it off extremely well, as he finally has somebody to talk to, besides his pet and the television (he can follow along with the dialog of Shrek perfectly). The use of the movie Shrek was very cleverly done - it uses a quote that really parallels their current situation. While he was resistant to the idea of going with them to start anew, he uses the movie to communicate, using things that he does know to get ideas across. We see the other survivor do the same thing, and it takes them a little while to relax a little.

I thought that it was interesting that they chose Vermont as a place for survivors, especially Bethel, which is a real town, and which I've been through a number of times. One of the survivors makes an offhand comment that the cold helped prevent the spread of the virus. It's a bit of a common misperception about Vermont, that it's cold here all the time - while we do have fairly cold winters, it's hardly Hoth year-round - the spring, summer and fall seasons are all quite nice. Winter's just a little longer than most places. Although, from what we do see of the zombie-vampire things, they wouldn't last long at all in the cold of Vermont, or probably anywhere outside of a city environment.

One of the more interesting parts of the film was the way the survivors operate. Smith stockpiles supplies, guns, locks up his doors to the extreme measures and generally does what he can to survive. The colony, which we see in the end of the film, seems to operate on that principle - behind the walls, there's a wind farm and a farm (another Vermont stereotype), and people walking around without bite marks everywhere.

The film succeeds on a number of levels - the strength of the acting - I'm continually surprised at Will Smith in films - I thought that he was abysmal in Independence Day, but thought that he did a good job in I, Robot, and by all reports, he did a very good job in Pursuit of Happiness. Here, he does an excellent job largely on his own - the scenes with him and Sam are the best in the movie and perhaps in this genre, at least in a long time.

The progression of the story is also a strength here, as we're slowly introduced to the situation and what life is like in a post-apocalyptic world. The film goes beyond a mere horror-zombie film. There's true depth here, in the isolation of Smith's character and his lack of belief in god and fate. What we're presented with is a solid film, with solid acting and a very good addition to the genre, as well as a fairly accurate vision of what would happen if everyone in the planet just died off. Go check out this movie, and while on your way to the theater, go pick up Alan Weisman's book, because if you like this, you'll be interested in what he has to say, the answer to the question : What would happen if everyone on the planet vanished? I Am Legend has quite an interesting take on that question - Plus zombies. I do admit, The World Without Us would be a fun read if it had them in it.

Language Barrier

I recently acquired the full ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 on DVD from a co-worker back in October. The full series was being released on one boxed set, and he was looking to get it, thus freeing up much space in his home. I jumped at the chance - Stargate SG-1 has been one of my favorite science fiction shows for a number of years, combining science fiction, outer space exploration and human cultures into one show. There's only one major gripe that I have with everything in the show: Everyone speaks English.

On the hundreds of planets that SG-1 visits, no matter how remote or whatever culture on earth they represent, the team easily identifies themselves in English, and quite easily communicates with the locals. Given the huge variety of languages here on Earth, this is a really odd coincidence that's never quite been explained within the show.

Interestingly, most of the written languages in the show are different - most of which have derivatives of English, Latin, or a number of other earth based languages - one of th show's main characters, Daniel Jackson, is familiar with most of them, and typically spends just a couple minutes with any given thing before knowing what it says.

Visiting other worlds and alien cultures has been a longtime staple of Science Fiction television, and there are numerous means in which shows have surpassed the language barrier.

My favorite method is the one in Farscape - small cultures of microbes injected into someone that allows the brain to interpret other languages is used as a means of intergalactic communication. Prior to his own injection, and at various points in the show, we see John Crichton seeing the various languages in action, or other civilians on Earth being unable to understand aliens as they come into contact with them. Foreign languages are clearly acknowledged and utilized when necessary. (Non-humanoid aliens are a specialty as well in Farscape). A method similar to this was a creation of the late Douglas Adams, the Babel fish, which, when inserted into one's ear, could translate any language into whatever the host language was.

Another method has consistently been a translator, such as in various points with Babylon 5, where numerous cultures co-existed alongside one another, or in other cases such as C-3P0 from the Star Wars movies, a droid who's programming and knowledge encompasses millions of known languages. It would make sense that this sort of thing would result in specialized robots, given their ability to be programmed with numerous languages without the problems of training time.

Still other methods exist - one being to have characters know a number of languages - the short lived Firefly presented a world where numerous Earth cultures came together into a blend in space, with English and Chinese being the dominate cultures and languages. In this instance, Chinese was largely used for profanity, but for other cultural nuances as well. This worked exceptionally well for the show, which was one of the first contemporary science fiction shows, presenting a fairly realistic view of cultures in space. What's even better is that this all existed within one race - humanity.

Other shows, such as Stargate have largely eliminated the use of foreign languages. (Stargate does utilize other languages, or will have machines translate, but not consistently). One show that does easily get away with this is Battlestar Galactica, which likewise also utilizes a human-only species makeup, and which also presented a fairly unified inter-solar culture that would logically have had one dominate language. Still, localized languages would most likely have existed.

The lack of diversity in science fiction is most likely due to the sheer complexity of language and implications that has for both practical purposes and for the sanity of the actors. Logically, a show such as Stargate SG-1 shouldn't have gone beyond more than a season with just one planet and I imagine that watching the characters struggle to translate a language over an entire season, while academically interesting, just doesn't bring the entertainment science fiction fans are looking for. After all, there are people to shoot and things to find.

The Upcoming Digital Revolution & Amazon.com's Kindle

Yesterday, a co-worker told me to go take a look at Amazon.com. There was a notice about a new product that the website is selling, the kindle. When I got home for the night, the current issue of Newsweek was sitting on the counter, with the kindle as the cover story.

The kindle is a new e-book reader that Amazon is pushing through, most likely to take advantage of the digital revolution and the effect that items such as the iPod have had on the music industry. It's probable that Jeff Bezos is hoping to replicate the same thing with their website. It's an interesting little device - it has the ability to connect to amazon.com and be independent of a computer. It's got a 30 hour power life and it's supposed to be very easy to read, given the nature of advances in screens. What really bugs me is that the article in Newsweek leads me to believe that Amazon.com or someone high up there owns the magazine - it reads as a glowing advertisement for the product. They essentially mark this as a huge change in the way that we're going to read. We're not.

This isn't going to change anything in any major way or form. The publishing industry has tried to do the whole e-book thing earlier in the century (it's fun to say that) and it didn't take off. I remember thinking that the ebook readers were really cool. The only problem was that the readers were expensive, the text was harder to read, books were hard to come by and were expensive. Not to mention that it runs on batteries, which can die on you. Compare this to the hard copy of a book. They've been around for five hundred years, they are flammable, but can be read at your convenience (aka, they're not going to run out of batteries), and they're relatively cheap. Plus, they're not going to vanish on you when the reader has a hardware problem or if you drop it. A book, however, might incur a little damage to the cover, which is what it's designed for.

The kindle does do some positive things in the direction towards e-books becoming popular - the reader can purchase books via the store on it's own as a unit and it seems to be easier to read. You can get a magazine or newspaper uploaded to it. However, the huge price, ($399) is certainly not helpful, as is the fact that publishers aren't going to lower prices for e-books - they'll remain about the same price. This caution on their part is probably a good thing, because I don't really see this taking off the way that the iPod has. People said the same thing about the iPod, but the method of listening to music has advanced to match technology. Record players, 8-Tracks, cassettes, CDs and now digital versions of the song only improve upon the ways that music is purchased and listened to. Literature, on the other hand, hasn't changed significantly over the past 500 years. It's still printed pages bound together. This device might bring these devices more popular, but it will not, as the article suggests, change the way that we read. This comes at a very, very interesting time. Over the past couple of days, a report was released, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, (article) that suggests that the number of people in the United States has dropped significantly over the past couple of years. The report looked over a broad range of ages, reading habits and is essentially an overview of a number of reports, all with the same conclusion - people read for pleasure less than they did a very short time ago. The NPR Report that I heard about this on maintained some other interesting statistics, mainly with personal success and reading level, and the results are astonishing, and amount to the following: the younger and more consistently a young person reads, the more likely they are to succeed. The current prison population maintains about a 3% higher reading level. Hopefully, this device will make it more accessible to people, more at least more hip. Slick electronic devices have that ability - look at the iPod compared to the other models out in the market now. I'm not wishing that this will go down in flames - I personally think that the new Sony reader, while not as good as this one, but it looks cool. I'd buy one, but the price tag is a huge factor and I'm not giving up my small library for anything. I still love the look, feel and smell of regular, old fashion, low tech books.

On Fanboys

This is a rant that's been building for a little while.

I hate fanboys. I absolutely can't stand the lording over such aweful movies such as Terminator 3, Transformers and every other Sci-Fi Genre movie, especially the blockbusters, with the sense that it's the absolute best thing to ever happen to cinema. Same thing goes for books, although to less of an extent. Television seems to be really untouched by this at times. To clarify, here's the wikipedia definition: "Fanboy is a term used to describe an individual (usually male; the feminine version fangirl may be used for females) who is utterly devoted to a single fannish subject, or to a single point of view within that subject, often to the point where it is considered an obsession. Fanboys remain loyal to their particular obsession, disregarding any factors (often including logic) that differ from their point of view." Now, there are various degrees to this, and I think that I personally avoid most of this.Star Wars is a big thing for this, and I mainly come across this sort of thing at discussion forums. I love Star Wars, I really do, but it's certainly not above critism, and has plenty of flaws throughout the broad range of movies, books and comics. The big thing is that Star Wars and now Lord of the Rings are essentially the fanboy's epitomy of Science Fiction and Fantasy movies, and it's almost like there's nothing better in the world, and critism of said movies is non-existant. Granted, I was like that for a long time. But those movies do deserve a bit of that to some extent. But it's the really bad movies that really get this sort of treatment. I can understand enjoying a blockbuster, but those are complete fluff when it comes to films.

Last year was a fantastic year for genre films - We had the Fountain, Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth, all absolutely brilliant works. This Summer, we had Transformers, Spiderman 3 and Fantastic Four, which not only gross more money but have the bigger budgets, cookie-cutter dialogue and screenwriting and CGI. These films get all the attention.

Fortunently, books and television, as mentioned, seem to really avoid this - maybe because it takes a little more effort to go through and it's not as visual at times, but there is the fanboy reaction for some of the larger books, such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and certainly with Star Trek and Star Wars books. Television series such as Battlestar Galactica and Heroes get a little of the attention, as does Firefly (that's a big one) as well as Star Trek, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. These are certainly worthy of some attention though, and it's not nearly to the same extent.

I just don't really understand it, and I can't really remember any reasons for completely adoring Star Wars when I did. I still read the books, but really look and read in the universe with a much more critical eye. I finished Death Star in a couple of days and really was let down by the story and quality, but the book gets high marks on the Literature section at the boards.theforce.net forums. On a happier note, Karen Traviss's books, which deserve more fanboy-ing, got higher marks.

I think what bothers me the most is the extreme close-mindedness of some of the people. I remember reading in near disbelief at someone writing in that there should be tie-in novels for Lord of the Rings in prose that's much more readable and with more action, something along the lines of what we see with the Star Wars and Star Trek books out there. Some things just shouldn't have that happen to them.

Okay, rant over.

Ongoing Writer's Strike

This is something that's been going on for the past couple of weeks shortly after takes between the Writers Guild of America and the major networks over disputes over payments to writers over the ways that their products are being distributed. Going back to when VHS tapes were first released, writers took a cut to help with the market. Now, with their works being distributed not only over television, but through DVD, online streams, mini-sodes and more, they want to be paid for this.
Now, this is where I have a problem, there's a whole lot of people saying one thing and another thing is probably taking place, largely around the internet viewings. Companies such as Viacom, Warner Brothers and so on have been telling their investors that these are prime markets, with hundreds of millions of dollars of potential for ad revenue. However, the writers have been told that this is too new of a market, that they can't place a cost on what they're earning. It's frustrating to read, and the point comes over that the larger corperations are essentially trying to maximize their profits at the expense of the writers. I'm inclined to agree with the writers - the internet is a huge market, and I believe that they really deserve a bigger share of what's rightfully theirs.
The pressure will be coming soon as television shows shut down. A bunch of shows have been caught with only a couple episodes, while others have sort of planned for this sort of thing. It'll affect not only the media networks with people who want their entertainment back, but also the writers, who'll probably be easier to push towards a deal that's unfavorable to them. The writers do have the public on their side - a recent poll put the public as overwhelmingly supporting their cause - 66%.
It'll be interesting to see how this affects not only the shows, which is bound to hurt networks as re-runs become more frequent, but also how it'll affect the entire playing field.

The War

Over the past five weeks, I've been running a series of screenings for the recent Ken Burns series, The War, on the Norwich campus. I had hoped that this would be a fairly popular draw for the Norwich community. Unfortunently, there wasn't as much in the way of interest as I'd hoped, for students or teachers here. On average, we had probably four or five students during the bi-weekly screenings, with only one or two instructors turning up each time. I reviewed The War here earlier, shortly after I purchased the companion book, from what I had come up with when I finished reading it. Having seen the entire fourteen-hour series, most of my opinions of the event remain, but there are a number of things that really struck me. My first introduction to Ken Burns was years ago with his series, The Civil War, which my parents had taped, being highly interested in the Civil War, and looking back, it's likely that this was something that helped get me interested in history, and in paticular, military history. The series used thousands of photographs and letters to illustrate the series. Burn's new series used photographs, but now had access to video footage - hours of it. The footage that they used was in color, black and white, of the soldiers from each side of the war, before combat, and during combat. This was the most shocking thing that I've really seen, and I think that there's a general dismissal of 'real' footage that is highly misplaced. Prior to the series' premire on television, there was quite a lot of controversy over the FCC and stations airing a 'clean' version of the series. Looking back over the past viewings that I've been holding, I can see the reasoning behind it. It was an incredibly hard thing to watch at times - unlike a movie, the violence here was real. When you see a person fall over, they were killed or wounded. When you see an explosion, more people were really killed, and it's not something that I've thought about lightly. The dynamic use of footage here really brings the events of World War II to life, quite literally. Along the way, there are letters, photographs and interviews with people who had been there. This is possibly one of the most accessible, and most complete documents out there for the Second World War, encompasing all of the major conflicts and the home front in vivid detail. Almost every conflict has a survivor talk about the events that they had to live through, and we watch as they relive the battles, and they smile, laugh, scowl and at times cry as they remember the men and events that passed by them. The battles are looked at in both a bird's - eye view of the war and on the personal level, something that is not easily or often done well. Watching through this entire series provides an excellent background to the Second World War, something that is really needed in a country that really only knows about Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Iwo Jima and Hiroshima. Often, in the after discussions that I helped run, inevitably, there was a "I didn't know ..." this or that, about various aspects of the war. I didn't know much about Anzio, North Africa, Italy, various elements of the Pacific and some elements of the home front. The series does gloss over elements, but this is certainly to be expected with a conflict as large as the Second World War. As I mentioned before, there is little on the build-up to the War, but there is quite a bit on the homefront reactions to V-J Day, although not much in the overall view. More than likely, those would comprise a documentary in and of themselves, given the complexity of the issues. Burns does dispell the notion of the Good War that is pounded in to the viewer. Often, the tolls of the wars are told again and again, and we really see what the effects of war is, something that we probably don't pay much attention to as often as we should. It's a something that is probably easier to forget or overlook in the aftermath and end result of the war - that the United States came out on top in the world. We won, and probably because of that, it was the good war. I don't doubt or argue with the notion that it wasn't a just war, given what the American, French, British, Polish, Belgium, Russian, New Zealand, Australian and other allied forces went up against, a massive and unspeakable evil that showed what some people could do to others. It may not have been a good war, but it was fought for very good reasons and Burns goes a long way towards showing that to us.