'Objects In Space'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
The other was that Marburg virus is a real thing.
I am the creepy person who totally knew about it but only because I find it fascinating. It's got the shepherd's crook tail too.
When was the last time you read a vignette from the perspective of a virus ?
It's WHAT? I am so reading this.
And reading anything by Richard Preston will totally freak you out if you think about it too much. There are bits of Hot Zone that I still have to quick skim through because they are so creepy.
When was the last time you read a vignette from the perspective of a virus ?
It's WHAT? I am so reading this.
To clarify, it's not first-person, but third-person, but it treats the virus like a character worth describing.
As her feathers swept through the air, they collected dust and pollen...and a few particles of Alpha-RC007. The hooks on the outside of the virus promptly latched onto the goose's wing, not aware, only reacting to the change in their environment. This was not a suitable host, and so the bulk of the virus remained inert, waiting, letting itself be carried along by its unwitting escort back down to the planet's surface.
To clarify, it's not first-person, but third-person, but it treats the virus like a character worth describing.
That is the best story ever. Basically 3rd person omni as a virus? I must own this. And read it. Over and over.
A couple of the vignettes. Others deal with human types. The trilogy as a whole is fascinating in it's analysis of virology.
For now, hie thee to LJ. Sounds like they might get collected and published at some point but the author is still mum on those prospect.
The Coming Plague is a great book about all the scary diseases and why we're poorly equipped to deal with them.
What Ginger said. TCP is amazingly scary, and all true.
I read The Hot Zone many years ago, when I was working for the Army, and was scheduled to do a site visit at Fort Detrick.
... when I learned the visit had been scheduled, I put down the book and didn't go back to it until after I'd been there. Because I wouldn't have been able to force myself through the gates if I knew too much about what went on there.
Oh, and don't read The Hot Zone over lunch, either.
So yes, I knew about Marburg.
Thanks for the links, I'll follow them up!
GRRM on lj talking ADWD and TWOW. He mentions POV characters that will or won't be in ADWD.
Maybe it because you first read Narnia when a child and Potter as an adult?
Maybe. But maybe it is because Lewis writes better prose and makes his world more convincing. The point of world building is not necessarily to have super-detailed layout of how economics and ecology and politics and everything happen in your world, thought that is one way to do it. It is to give the reader the impression that what they see if your world is a glimpse of a much bigger world where politics and economics and ecology are going on in ways they are not seeing. It is to give the illusion of a world, which need not be photorealistic or logically consistent. (Logical inconsistency is a flaw but not necessarily a fatal one, any more than a magician's patter has to be a marvel of logic and formal argument.) Lewis is , IMO, a better magician a better illustionist.
Oh, I want this book bag so much. SO much.