Hi, I'm MelloBiafra, thanks for looking in on my blog. To be honest, I'm not much of a blogger as anyone who's read my previous attempts will realise! But I'm gonna give it another go.
All I'm really hope to do here is a give you an idea what I'm playing, listening to and reading. I'm a huge SF fan. I'd like to think that after almost three decades of fandom I might know a little bit about the genre. If you stay with me and check in now and again I hope, that if nothing else, you might get a recommendation or two from what I'm into and maybe discover a gem.
Reading:
I'm reading some fairly mainstream stuff at the minute, having a little more time on my hands at the minute to trawl through some of the more heavyweight books that I've had kicking about on my bookshelves for a while waiting an opportune moment.
I'm primarily reading the Helliconia Trilogy by Brian Aldiss.
This was a book I've had for over a decade and made many starts on, but never seemed to be able to persist with beyond the first few hundred pages. I picked it up and decided to go at it again from the start and this time for some reason I just seem to be in a much better mind-set to appreciate it. It's superb and certainly a vision of an ecosystem that is far superior even to the Arrakis of the Dune cycles.
I've just finished Helliconia Spring but I am taking a break to finish a couple of other books I've had on the go before I get back into Helliconia Summer.
The books that I need to finish next will be The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson and Chapterhouse Dune by Frank Herbert. I'm a little over halfway through with both. I'm enjoying Chapterhouse immensely, having gone through a major non-dune Herbert reading phase recently. I've been a huge fan of the Dune series since I was about 12, though shamefully I hadn't read any of the later books in the cycle. I thought things got a little repetitive and laborious to follow in God Emperor of Dune and I'd lost interest. I'd then read all Brian Herbert's Legends of Dune and whilst not a patch on the original cycle, I did enjoy them. As there are some recent releases to the traditional Dune Cycle, I decided to have another go at the later books in the original sequence. I'm enjoying them immensely this time.
Kim Stanley Robinson's The Memory of Whiteness is an odd tale and got a little bit dull midway and I abandoned it a few monthes ago. However coming across my copy recently I was suprised how much of it had stuck with me and that I really was curious to discover what happen in the end. So I'm gonna finish it. I've read Red Mars and Blue Mars and while you have to admire KSR's technical ability and the refreshing hard SF plausiblity of that series, I wouldn't be killing myself to finish the series, though for the sake of completeness I probably will.
Playing:
I've just finished Star Wars: Republic Commando.
Very linear and a little dated by today's standards, but still very enjoyable. One of the best Star Wars franchise games I've ever played. Also the first computer game I have ever completely finished in my life! Yayyy!
Currently I'm Enjoying
Got myself a decent new graphics card for my PC and a copy of Bioshock to finally see if the hype was justified. So far it is...but then I'm only on the second level!
I love the concept of the X games as I am one of the generation of original players of the classic Elite (on the Spectrum.) I hoped to recapture a little of that open-ended, space trading, life sapping, total submersion with the original X2, but having sorted various technical issues, found it frustrating and a little shallow. X3 is extremely similar, but the new graphics card sure does make it superficially attractive. But almost impossible to get anywhere in it without having to resort to walkthroughs. I will persist for a while yet though.
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