Just Wondering

Who is the smartest person you know?

Who is the most creative person you know?

Who thinks of you as a hero to them(this includes animals)?

Good Morning!

Sunny Saturday

Well, what a lovely sunny day for the start of the festival weekend. Feels like  Sring already.

I have just quickly run the hoover around the flat and dusted a little. Then I shall shower next before going out.

I will pop down to see Kate at Past Sentence to unload some paperbacks on her for remuneration.

My first literary event starts at 2pm which will be Iain Sinclair.
The next one featuring Eliane Glaser is at 3.30 pm and Viv is on at 5pm.

I hope to take some pics as well.  

Book 16 - Alastair Reynolds "House Of Suns"

Alastair Reynolds "House Of Suns"(Gollancz)





In the early fourth millennium, humanity largely lives within the light-hour surrounding our own Sun, and a few wealthy tycoons take up galactic tourism: they clone themselves a thousand times (often with genetic variations, including gender), decanting their personality into each clone, and set out in a thousand ships to travel the galaxy at near-lightspeed, with plans to meet up later. As civilizations rise and fall across the galaxy, these “shatterlings” (with the assistance of technologies for suspended animation, life extension, and time dilation) see six million years pass, trading information and expertise to the worlds they visit.

The book has two parallel stories: a shorter one following the youth of Abigail Gentian, who grows up to spawn the thousand shatterlings called Gentian Line (or the House of Flowers, since all of them are named after flowers), and a larger one following the intertwined lives of two of her shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, who have broken the rules of their Line, fallen in love, and taken up traveling together. They arrive late at a scheduled reunion of the Line, fearing censure by their fellows, and discover that someone has attempted to wipe out the entire clan. Their challenge is to figure out who did it, and why— and to survive.

Reynolds does a good job of keeping the suspense high even as the action stretches over the decades and centuries of interstellar travel. The tale includes some reflections on recent events, including the fear of the Other and the erosion of morality in times of stress. The feel is very much in the New Space Opera style but is not as dark as others.

It's Caturday!

Faversham Literary Festival PIcs

The three discussions I went to were all varied, two being intellectual and the other by Viv Albertine being funny, acerbic, self-deprecating and wild.

I got Iain Sinclair and Viv to sign books I took with me.


These are the photos I took -



Iain Sinclair.





Charles Umney (current book "Class Matters") on the left and Eliane Glaser at the political philosophical middle event. Unfortunately, the mike got in the way from my angle but she was attending the talk from Viv, so I managed to get a decent pic of her then.



I think she was looking for a friend.

This is a pic of her from Wiki -




Glaser has written for the Independent, New Statesman, and the London Review of Books, and is a contributor to The Guardian, where she has written articles on contemporary propaganda, fake authenticity, Astroturf politics, cyber-utopianism, and the ideology of natural childbirth. Glaser is a regular contributor to, producer of, and sometime presenter for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

And then we had the riotous wonderful and outspoken Viv Albertine, former punkette of the Slits. I just love her, and meeting her and talking to her at the book signing at the end of the talk was a great thrill.



Awesome and funny. Yep, I am a fan!

When it came to Q&A time, one guy piped out "Will you marry me!" and she just cussed him politely saying "No love I am all shagged out!"




She has a wonderful smile, and scary - not a bit of it!

Good Night