I just listened through all of Cabin Pressure again. This is one of my favourite Radio 4 comedy. I’ve heard all of the episodes quite a few times now, what with listening to it as it was broadcast over the past few years and then listening to it again at times like this. I wrote a bit about it before so I won’t go in to too much detail here because this isn’t really a review.

I’ve been feeling pretty down lately, and I’m very stressed with university stuff, so what I usually do is listen to an episode of a radio comedy show when I go to bed, which helps me get sleepy without just lying in bed with my mind racing. Also I try to get in a 30 minute walk a day, which is the perfect time to listen to a half hour radio comedy. So you may have noticed that I’ve reviewed quite a few radio shows recently.

I had run out of new stuff to listen to which is why I decided to listen again to this show. So here is a pretty good recommendation: even when I am utterly miserable, Cabin Pressure can make me laugh and put a smile on my face for 30 minutes a day. I really don’t know what else you would want from a comedy show.

‘For? What is all science for!’ exclaimed the scientist. ‘Pushing back frontiers! The thrill of discovery! Advancing the sum total of human knowledge and endeavour! And looking down ladies’ tops.’

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe is a funny, odd little book about pirates and scientists and all kinds of hilarious pirate adventures. I didn’t really know what to expect from it other than that it had been highly recommended and that they are making a film based on the book which looks fantastic. It is short and easy to read, and in some ways it almost felt like a great kids book, other than a few places where the humour was a little risqué. Overall I thought it was a lot of fun to read and it was a great little distraction for me from some of the more serious books I’ve been struggling to get through. If anyone wants to read something silly and piratey then I would recommend this book to them!

This is the trailer for The Pirates! Band of Misfits. It looks like it is going to be brilliant!

British Transport Police were called to a train station in Inverness, Scotland, after worried railway staff identified a model haggis dressed in a tartan kilt as a possible security threat.

I have spent probably too much time today watching Vlogbrothers videos on YouTube (apologies for the poor quality screencap). I’d heard of them before and seen a few videos here and there as they popped up on Tumblr, but honestly I was not too familiar with them. Then today I followed another random link to one of their videos and got sucked in. They make funny and interesting videos and I have really enjoyed what I’ve seen so far. I’m also intrigued by the whole YouTube celebrity thing in general, as I haven’t really watched any other video blogs either, but I know there are some massively popular ones, and Hank and John Green in particular seem to have become incredibly popular and built up a pretty amazing fan base. Based on the videos, I can see why. I am looking forward to watching through more of their videos in the future, they will certainly be good for taking short breaks when I am studying (just as long as I stick to one video and don’t get sucked in to watching tons of them like I did today!).

This is cool - various books mapped onto Edinburgh based on references to the city in the books. Includes some Scottish SF authors such as Iain Banks, Ken Macleod and Charles Stross.

Well, if there has to be graffiti, then let there be graffiti of famous science fiction authors.

Here is another post reviewing some radio comedies that I have been listening to. Because of course my reviews of obscure radio programmes are always so popular! </sarcasm>

• The Castle is a radio sitcom which describes itself as, ‘a comedy set in the filth, stench and grime of the middle ages, with some nice music’. It was quite funny, and there were a few great jokes here and there, but overall it was nowhere near as good as some of the other Radio 4 sitcoms out there. But since I am rapidly running out of radio comedies to listen to, it was good to hear it anyway.

• Elvenquest is a parody of Tolkienesque fantasy epics. I wrote about it here when I listened to the show last year, so I won’t repeat myself, just see that review for a fuller summary of the show. The third series was recently broadcast so I listened to the whole show again including the new episodes. I really enjoy it, it is definitely one of my favourites of the radio sitcoms that I listen to, and if anything I enjoyed it more the second time through. I’d really recommend this one.
  

• Bleak Expectations was one of the first radio sitcoms I listened to last year; before that I was mostly tuning in (er, to iPlayer) for the panel shows and sketch shows. Again, you can read my earlier review for a proper summary. I listened to it all again over the recent holidays, and it is still superb. I am looking forward to the fifth series hopefully coming up this year, and to the spin off television show.

• I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is Radio 4’s ‘perennial antidote to panel games’. It was pretty much the first radio show I started listening to, and it is still the finest panel show on the radio. I have quite a few old episodes that I have been listening to, and I realised that I have never really mentioned the show before, so I should at least include a mention of ISIHAC if I am doing a post about radio shows!

I’m not sure what I’ll be listening to next but I do love my Radio 4 comedies at the moment.

For The Win by Cory Doctorow is a YA science fiction novel set in the near future focusing on online gaming, gold farming and economics. The book features many characters who are gold farmers and other game players from around China and India. These characters make their living playing games but are exploited for their labour and so they form a union which could bring could the economy of the games and have a big impact in the real world.

I have a mixed history with Cory Doctorow. Having read this one I have now read all of his novels. I thought his earlier books were okay, then I absolutely loved Little Brother, his previous YA book, and then absolutely hated Makers, his last novel before this one.

I liked this one. I thought it got the balance right between presenting interesting ideas and having a good plot and characters. I actually wish I had read it last year around the same time I read Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, as I felt they had some ideas in common and this one, which is fast paced and enjoyable, would have been a good counterpoint to that massively bloated book.

Overall I enjoyed it and I would recommend checking it out if you are interested in that kind of near-future SF. You can actually get it for free as an ebook from Doctorow’s website; indeed all of his books are available as free downloads, which makes it nice and easy to check it out and see if you like his writing (although this one did have some ‘adverts’ for book shops in it that were written by Doctorow, which annoyed me a bit). 

A few years ago I read about 70 books that were part of a series called SF Masterworks, a collection of reprinted classics from the SF genre. This was a great series which introduced me to many great books and helped me establish my particular likes and dislikes in the genre. The publisher stopped the series about 2007, but eventually started up again in 2010, reprinting some of the books that had been part of the original series, and starting to bring more great SF books back into print as part of the new series.

Last year I re-read several of the titles that I had loved when I first read them a few years ago now, and I wrote about it here. This year I decided that I would read some of the new titles in the series, and I started with Inverted World by Christopher Priest. This was actually a book that I had heard of a couple of years ago and wanted to read, but I couldn’t find a copy as it was out-of-print; that is one of the reasons why the SF Masterworks series is so great, bringing older but highly praised books to a new audience.

The protagonist of the book is a young man for a city called Earth. The city is being moved; for the past two hundred years most people have lived in comfort inside the city while teams of guildsmen slowly move it on massive train tracks. The narrator, when he comes of age, joins one of these guilds, and learns about the nature of the strange world that they live on, and the reasons why the city has to be moved.

The setting is incredibly interesting, a really fascinating and original idea. The writing and the way this world is introduced to the reader through the eyes of the narrator/protagonist is extremely compelling. It is full of imaginative and interesting ideas about perception. And then there is a twist which is really incredibly unexpected and very good. I really loved it, and it was a great way to kick off what will hopefully be some good SF reading for me this year.

I started watching Baccano! at the weekend; six episodes in and I only vaguely know what is going on. But it is great fun so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it soon. The opening credits are damn catchy, I’ve had the music stuck in my head for the past week!

I finally finished reading Zone One by Colson Whitehead, which I have been struggling through for the past week. The cover describes it as ‘a zombie novel with brains’ and I think that part of my problem with the book is that I am really not into the whole zombies thing. (Why did I choose to read the book then? Well, that is a valid question. The answer is that it was chosen by the book group I have recently joined. I would not have picked it to read myself, and even if for some reason I had picked it myself, I probably would have abandoned it halfway through. But I felt obligated to finish it so I can properly discuss it when the group meets in a few weeks.)

The book is set some time after a rather vague zombie plague apocalypse situation. The main character works as part of a team cleaning out Zone One, which is part of New York, tracking down any zombie stragglers. The book covers three days of his life there, while multiple flashbacks give his perspective of the plague and the events after that.

On one hand it is very well written with a real literary style. I can see why people are praising it as being an intelligent take on the whole zombie craze (albeit a touch pretentious at times, I thought). But on the other hand I found it really, unbearably boring. No amount of stylish writing can make up for the dreary lack of plot. I may be biased by my general lack of interest in the subject, but the book did nothing to get my attention either. I really did not enjoy it at all.

Edward is an agent of the Culture, a galaxy-spanning post-human civilization run by smart-ass AIs. Against the backdrop of the Idrian War, Edward’s been sent on a mission to a non-Culture world, as part of a war strategy only understandable by an AI. On that world, he meets Bella, who is awed by his super human strength and sparkling skin (all part and parcel of the wacky post-human benefits package bestowed by the Culture.) Meanwhile, Jacob, a shapeshifting humanoid agent hired by the Idrians (who are dour, religious lizards) discovers Edward romancing Bella (triggering several pages of Jacob describing Edward’s abilities in loathing detail.)

Edward and Jacob fight over Bella’s affections, involving several set pieces where Edward, Jacob, and finally, ships the size of moons blow up the scenery, including world-sized artifacts of long-gone, but impressive alien species.

Edward finally triumphs over Jacob, but Bella’s blasted to flinders in the crossfire. However, the Culture sprinkles nano-dust over the 3AU wide cloud of atoms which she has become, restoring her.

Edward, tired of life after the apocalyptic struggle, asks his AI masters to teleport him into the core of a star.

In an epilogue, it is revealed that the narrator is not only Bella’s daughter, who married Jacob, but she’s the protagonist of an earlier Culture novel.

Sounds about right. And I for one would read that…

See also: if famous writers had written Twilight.

I have no television in my flat which means that I cannot watch television shows live, I need to wait until they appear on iPlayer, so I usually wait until the next day. So last night while almost everyone I know was watching Sherlock, instead I was lying in bed feeling jealous. Even my noisy neighbours were watching it at a deafening volume - I actually had to put my headphones on to avoid any spoilers transmitted through the ceiling. To keep myself occupied I read all of The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle. It is not my favourite of the Holmes books, but it is still a good little novel, and it was a great choice for distracting myself. Now I just need to avoid the internet all day until I can watch Sherlock after my class this afternoon!

I have been a bit busy the past few days getting things sorted for the start of the new semester. Having been home for just over a month, I am now back in my flat at university. It is actually a lot warmer and nicer here than I had remembered, and I have spent the afternoon getting all my things sorted out and tidied away. The main downside is my noisy neighbours, who tormented me last semester when they acquired a keyboard and a guitar and seemed to think that 1am was an appropriate time for music practice. They have spent most of the afternoon playing and do not appear to have improved at all in my absence. I have been trying to drown out the noise by listening to old episodes of I’ve Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Right now they are butchering a version of Smells Like Teen Spirit (at least I think that is what they are trying to play). I am contemplating finding an episode of ISIHAC which features Jeremy Hardy singing and then turning up the volume on my laptop! Overall however it is okay to be back here.