Can we chip in and buy that for Shawn?

Long, long ago (perhaps 2 months), when I was talking about Cowboy Bebop the movie, and how horrid it was, someone suggested that I watch the episodes instead. Well, the first two DVDs finally came in on interlibrary loan, and I watched most of the first one over the weekend. I have got to say, wow! They are pretty darned good so far. I can certainly see the similarities with Firefly, enough so that I would watch these on tv if I didn't have Firefly. Of course Firefly is better, and would be even if these weren't animated, which is a tough hurdle for me.

Before anyone gets on my case, I am not at all saying that Firefly copied them. There is plenty of Firefly that is original, as well as that which is copied from a multitude of sources (which is meant as a compliment. It's what makes the Firefly 'verse so real). The writing on Firefly is immensely better (I'm not sure how much of that is from translating Cowboy Bebop, and how much is just inherently better). But the plots have the same touch of quirk and lack of total resolution; the characters are different, but have the same feeling of completeness even without all the backstory; there is some similarity to the "sets" (i.e. the gates look a lot like the net in OMR, although their use is completely different). Plus, the music is just shiny. The intro reminds me of The Avengers. Lovely.

I don't know if anyone involved with Firefly ever even saw Cowboy Bebop. I wouldn't say the similarity would be enough to cause problems with copyright or licensing, but what a shiny, shiny show.

And it's pretty humorous listening to them dubbed in English with English subtitles that barely match. I find myself picking and choosing between the two for the one that I like best. I guess that's one way to improve writing!

xpost with Firefly 3, because my brain is a sieve, and I don't remember which one I had discussed it on.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Orson Scott Card. I love the Ender books and Pastwatch.

I loved Ender's Game, Treason, and especially the Worthing Chronicles/Saga. But I'm finding that the characters in his series grow increasingly Mary-Suish and annoying the longer the series go on. I've also gotten very turned off by his personal views on politics and homosexuality.

I've been reading a fantasy series by Laurell K. Hamilton, about a private detective named Meredith Gentry. It's a little bit sexy.

Merry Gentry a little bit sexy is like saying Spike is a little bit dead!

He's only mostly dead.

t dies laughing at the idea of LKH as "a little bit sexy"

ION, I have just discovered a great book about books called Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. As the title implies, it's a book of lists, but unlike many of the others, this one is annotated. Woot!

The best part about summer vacation for me is catching up on pleasure reading. Sooo happy.

Calli, CJ Cherryh does both fantasy and SF, both very well. Her plots are complicated, her characters deeply flawed. Stories move fast and generally everyone is injured, hungry, and/or exhausted for most of the action. Also under-informed, much like the reader.

She has a hugeass series of loosely-linked novels about human expansion, colonization, and cloning, called the Merchant-Alliance universe. The first of those is Downbelow Station, and it's as good a place as any to start: it won the Hugo and Nebula the year it came out.

Her Foreigner series is very popular, and is all about human-alien interaction, about alienation and cultural assumptions. That starts with Foreigner, I believe. Although those themes are ones she returns to again and again, for instance with The Faded Sun trilogy about a dying alien race, or Cuckoo's Egg or 40,000 in Gehenna or the Chanur series.

The Chanur series is pretty much straight space opera, told from the perspective of a grumpy female ship's captain who also happens to be, basically, a cat. Her crew takes in a creature they've never seen before, a "human", and get caught up in interstellar politics and intrigue about the possibility of a new species, and new trade openings. The Chanur stories are complex politically, but I find them less dense and more entertaining than the Merchant-Alliance novels, including Cyteen.

Rider at the Gate and Storm's Rider are what happens when a thoughtful and cynical writer like Cherryh takes on that classic trope of adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy plumbed to such great success by folks like McCaffrey and Lackey. Telepathic animals in the same place as self-absorbed teenagers with raging hormones may not necessarily end in happily-ever-after...

Gate of Ivrel is Cherryh's first novel, the first of quartet of novels that read like fantasy wrapped in a gloss of science fiction. Morgaine is the last surviver of a team sent out to destroy the world gates, because they're too dangerous: they cross both time and space, and misuse is not only possible, it's guaranteed. She meets up with a very young man from a medieval culture, who doesn't understand anything of what she is or what she is about, except that she's very very dangerous... The Morgaine novels are great adventures, and I love the characters in them probably best of all of her characters.

Most if not all of these are in print, or you can find them at half.com.

Consuela, when did Gate of Ivrel come out? I remember meeting her at the WorldCon when I was in junior high, when it happened to be in Miami. She was very young and being squired around as Hot New Talent by the veteran writers of the Con scene like Lin Carter.

(I was at the Miami Worldcon.)