GRRM is not your bitch
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Just finished John Scalziās The Consuming Fire, 2nd in the series started with The Collapsing Empire. Just as good as the first. Terrific world building, great characters with lots of personality (good and bad). My only complaint is that I have no idea what any of the characters look like! But thatās just his style.
And the humor is just fabulous.
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just finished
the author speaks at Google
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Iām really enjoying this. Itās a bit YA in nature I suppose but a lot of fun. It doesnāt seem to be a Cosmere novel, but I wouldnāt put it past Sanderson to tie it in in a plot twist later.
A lot more fun than the last couple of things I read.
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ā¦okay, it has some grim bits too. I should have expected that given the author.
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Iām almost finished A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranstonās memoir. Interesting and he seems to be a lovely, genuine guy. But, if you havenāt seen Breaking Bad (as I havenāt), be warned: spoiler alert. He writes in detail about Walterās motivations, what kind of things informed the character, etc etcā¦ including what @Melizmatic specifically wrote about in the wotcha watching thread the other day.
Oh, and did you know he has an adult daughter whoās an actor? Apparently she goes by a different name (which he doesnāt provide - no spoilers there!). Gonna have to do some snooping and see if I can find out who she is.
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Never heard of her
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Iāve heard good things about Sweet/Vicious, but that it was cancelled too early.
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Iād never heard of the show either, but I love the concept
Iām reading and enjoying Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, a kind of history/quadruple biography of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, and John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Isaac Asimov. Itās revealing, almost disturbingly so.
Summary
The book paints a pretty sorry picture of Hubbard, as a pathological liar, narcissist, obsessive, delusional and psychopathic, but it doesnāt make Campbell look particularly good either. Both really went down the garden path as far as reality was concerned. Campbell seemed to think science fiction, and later (along with Hubbard) mental studies of one sort or another could change the world, prevent war, etc. Campbell at least comes off as sincere, but Hubbard seems to shift fluidly from con-man to wannabe-messiah and back again. Both men wanted to be more than they were, never satisfied.
Alas my opinion of Campbell, not good anyway, has sadly decreased. I didnāt think my opinion of Hubbard could get any worse, but somehow he managed.
Heinlein seems rather tame in comparison, though I wonder why he was so close to Hubbard, given how his stories of sea adventures and being wounded in WWII were obvious lies. I guess he was fun to be with?? Itās interesting to see his politics deteriorate from a socially-conscious liberal to some kind of mix of conservative and libertarian. The whole idea of the ācompetent man,ā who could do anything is just so ridiculous.
Asimov is one of my heroes, but Iāve always known he was, frankly, a molester of women. I canāt help it; my love for his writing (starting probably two decades befor my awareness of his faults) transcends that. Itās really hard to ignore a writer who seems to be in the room with me, talking to me personally, a friend.
My one concern with the book is that paragraphs of detail about Asimov seemed to have been lifted directly from his autobiography. I believe the Nevala-Lee has a large bibliography at the end of the book, but Iām not enough of an expert to know whether it represents fair use or not.
This is fascinating look at the Golden Age of science fiction and beyond.
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The book has a huge, impressive bibliography! I withdraw my concern.
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That sounds like an interesting book, although not necessarily a fun read.
I think Heinlein is one of those authors whoās fairly easy to outgrow. I read a pretty good chunk of his stuff (other than the early YA books) when I was young, but havenāt had the urge to read him in a long time.
I donāt know much about Heinleinās life or the context of the quote, but Iāve always loved the sentiment behind āspecialization is for insects,ā at least as I interpret it. To me, it wasnāt about being able to do anything, per se, but about cultivating a variety of interests and skills. Sort of like getting a āwell-rounded educationā as an undergrad ā itās the difference between the College of Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences.
But maybe thatās because Iām the type of person whoās generally curious but also easily bored. I used to start a lot of āprojectsā with great enthusiasm but rarely finish them. 
Thatās a bummer about Asimov, though. I agree heās easily the best of the four, and I can remember deliberately seeking out everything I could find by him after stumbling across one of the Empire or Foundation books (I canāt recall which). One of my high-school English teachers even let me do a book report on Foundation.
Have you ever read Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury? Itās not authorized canon, but itās set in the Foundation universe, and explored some of itās themes in quite a bit of detail (it was a looong book). It was also a mystery novel of a sort, but the main thing I remember was a pretty involved sub-plot about figuring out the origins and historical length of the meter (or maybe it wasnāt the meter specifically, but it was a unit of measurement, roughly analogous to the question āhow long is a cubit?ā but with a much longer time span of history). Anyway, if youāre into Asimovās Foundation stuff, you might enjoy that book.
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Iād been thinking about that line, and itās interesting, it can cut so far on either edge. On one, like you said, specialization sounds so limiting. An ant becomes a soldier or a forager or a honeypot, and that task is her life. No wonder at the love for leaving that to them. People should be free to try many things, to be many things, instead of reduced to one.
But on the other, talking about Heinlein it is hard not to consider market ideology, where everything is about competing for the top spot. The competent man who masters everything asks for a single height, and to me this goes for how society treats a few Zuckerburgs and Bezoi as better than everyone else. If you were as good, youād win that same status. Anything less is for little people. You know. Bugs.
Meanwhile specialization is why the world is amazingly full of insects. No one sort is best, and instead each has its own niche. Some live in forests, some deserts; some eat anything, and some are tuned to a single food; some hide and some soar in the open. And in this way the exclusion that comes about through competition is escaped, and an unfathomable diversity manage to coexist.
I think that vision is much more inspiring. I want society to have room for different sorts of craftsmen and artists, scientists and historians, doctors and mediators, manufacturers and repairers, architects and conservationists, to all be accepted as valuable. The sentiment that people should be more than a singe role is good, but only works if we recognize a well-rounded world takes many kinds.
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Oh, I so love your post.
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Now Iām reading Fletcher Knebelās Night Of Camp David, a political thriller from 1965. What would happen if someone concluded the president was insane? In some ways, it is dated (treatment of women, of course), but for the most part the author avoids minor things that would obviously set the book back 50 years. Itās a real page-turner. And so prophetic!
ETA: I first read this book back in maybe 1976?
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Because weāve learned nothing from the first one
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Iām now rereading Summertide, by Charles Sheffield. Itās the first book in a series. Iād forgotten how creative it is, from a science fiction point of view. There are just so many cool concepts. The characters are extremely interesting, and of several different alien species and thought patterns. Definitely hard science fiction.
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