Et tu, blogger?

Blogger has really been acting up on me recently. On Internet explorer, it lets me sign in and post and stuff, but won't let me respond to comments readers are making, which is driving me nuts. Even basic functionality is weird. For whatever reason, I have to click "publish post" and then hit enter. Clicking just ain't enough. So I tried using Firefox. Firefox won't even let me sign in. Keeps babbling about how I need to enable cookies. So I checked. They're enabled. Hear that, Firefox? I'm an enabler. Hell, they were enabled by default. So stop your bitching and just let me in.

Anyway, seems I'm not the only one bothered by the way things are named in SF and Fantasy. And although I didn't see it as a problem when I read Ender's Shadow, I guess from reader comments that the Call of the Earth series is neither the first nor last time Orson Scott Card himself is guilty of this particular crime. Which sucks, really. I know I've said it before, but SF and Fantasy tend to be over-written, derivative, in-bred books designed to be difficult for "outsiders" to pick up under any circumstances and be difficult even for genre lovers unless you follow the entire series from the start, which is hard to do since it becomes incredibly difficult to find niche backlist books. You always see the same ones. Oh good. Books two and six. Why never one or three-through-five? Shutup. Stop asking questions. Well, e-books can potentially change all that so I guess I'll stop harping on it for a second.

With all this said, I enjoyed Card anyway (and he was a very big name once upon a time). What was different? Mostly his characters. They're distinct. In light fantasy etc. it wouldn't be a surprise but in the serious stuff, characters tend to get lost in the sheer size of the cast, or because they play the archetype to the hilt. The book I was talking about didn't even read like a genre book. The entire story happens over a matter of days. The great journey is still ahead of the characters. Everything in the book was interpersonal drama and politics. My favorite character was actually that dude with the inprounouncable name- Vozmuzholnoy Vozmuzhno (Written from memory...did I get it right?). He's this very clever, extremely ambitious, ruthless general bent on revenge against the "imperator" who claims to be the embodiment of God who destroyed Vozwhatever's tribe. Everything he says is true, but twisted around deliciously. He's very good at manipulating people. Pick your game, he'll still beat you at it. If somehow you think that very smart, even gentlemanly bloodthirsty warmongers don't make for stories I find fun, you obviously haven't been reading this blog for very long. Voz also isn't that different from Bean from the Ender's Game books and the focus of Ender's Shadow. Bean is pretty much why that book was great. A cold, ultra brilliant little kid who knows perfectly well he's the smartest person ever, but who accepts being second in command because he knows no one wants to see him lead and who, at the same time, is just a little kid looking desperately for a place to belong.

Anyway, while I'm on the subject of SF etc. would you folks like to see a sort of book-battle-review between pythons? Specifically, it'd be Eric Idle's Road to Mars vs. Terry Jones' novelization of Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic. Anyone interested?