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March 03, 2009

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there's one genuinely scary scene early on that reminded me of how nervous I was about the basement of my last rental apartment

Rats?
Big rats?

If you pick up the book, be advised to avoid reading the cover copy.

I never read the cover copy of any book if I can help it. Even when it's not in a genre that relies on the plot twists, I prefer to start a book knowing as little as possible about what's going to happen. (Not to mention the confusions that can result when the cover copy and the book are more loosely connected than one might expect...)

Serge,
No. Not rats. The basement that made me nervous had cats, in any case - one of them had kittens in my storage room. It was a big old house with a basement divided up into little rooms, rather like in Silence of the Lambs, with very uneven lighting, and I was just irrationally nervous about going down there alone. I grew up in Texas, and we didn't have basements there, so they always seem vaguely creepy to me. Even my own basement.

Paul,
How do you figure out if you want to read a particular book? I usually read the cover copy sometime in the buying process. Usually it isn't a problem, but I think that level of reveal in this sort of novel is outrageous.

Among the instructions I received when I started freelancing reviews for Publisher's Weekly was to generally avoid referring to events past the halfway point of the book.

Susan... You make that basement sounds like the one where Norman Bates keeps his mom. As for myself, basements were part of the culture and don't have negative associations, except for my family's, where the ceiling was a bit low for tall me. How many times I banged my head on solid metal pipes...

I seldom buy a book on impulse. I will usually have read a review, or I already know of the author.

Serge,
I haven't seen Psycho, and I suspect you have just spoiled me for some plot element, eh? I'm not sure I'll ever see it given the subject matter, but please be careful.

My current basement has a very impressive house-beam, the apparatus from an old oil tank, and the ghost of a former staircase. It's pretty cool.

Susan... Actually, no plot elements were spoiled as I was quite careful about how I worded it. Rixo visitors who've seen the movie will know what I mean. Heheheh...

Oh, yes, house beams... My skull was quite intimately acquainted with those. Let's say that I quickly learned about the overlap between my personal space and the rest of the world.

Susan,

I mostly stick to books that have been recommended, or that are by authors I've liked before, or other such techniques. That gives me quite enough books to be getting on with.

That said, I have occasionally been wandering in a bookshop when a book has caught my eye, and I've read the blurb, and then bought it. Most of those books are still in my to-read pile somewhere, and I've long since forgotten what the blurb actually said.

Paul,
Unfortunately, I have an irresistible attraction to anything printed, so unless the book's cover is stripped, it's difficult for me to avoid rereading the blurb the minute I pick it up. I have to exercise strict self-control as a reviewer not to do so, but I can't maintain that level of discipline the rest of the time.

Oh, yes, house beams... My skull was quite intimately acquainted with those.

My basement ceiling isn't incredibly low, but Neil probably wouldn't be happy there. I'm fortunate to have high ceilings in the rest of my house, though.

I was measured by a team of Year 9s (13&14 year olds) on Monday and they came up with a figure of 196cm. Very low places are okay, as I see them coming, and/or sit still. It's the doorways that are above my eyeline but lower than my head that catch me out.

(converts to old system) Yeah, at 6'5" you probably wouldn't like my basement too much.

I'd be happy to stand next to you sometime and enjoy feeling short, though!

Well, next time we're on the same continent, we'll stand next to each other.

I'll try not to treat you like the kids at school - "I'm just tall. It's not that interesting. Get over it and do some work!"

Neil,
You'd have trouble convincing me you're not interesting.

I suddenlyu feel short in spite of my 183cm.

I feel inadequate because I keep having to use a converter to figure out how tall these measures in cm are (I can do miles -> km in my head, but converting up from cm and then back down to inches is more mental math than I can do quickly.)

Myself, I am a respectable (for a woman) 175cm. I do not feel short in general, so I expect standing next to Neil would be sort of interesting that way.

Don't feel inadequate, Susan. I only know my height in metric because I grew up in Canada. I'm exactly 6' tall and, if I remember correctly, you are 5'8". Yes, standing next to Neil would be interesting - for me too.

I measure somewhere between 5'8" and 5'9".

I can do the miles/km conversions because the first few times I drove to Stratford (Ont.) I did so in an old car without km-per-hour marked on the dial, so to figure out how fast I could legally drive I had to work out the conversion on the fly while driving merrily along. Now I can estimate it pretty easily but don't have to, since my speed gauge has km marked as well as miles.

It's my height I find uninteresting, especially after three weeks of people introducing themselves by saying "How tall are you?" and "You're really tall". I almost prefer the ones who answer any question or statement with "What?".

Neil... It beats being asked "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"

Neil,
Well, I expect that should I get the opportunity to crane my neck and look up at you I'd say something equally dimwitted. Sorry. I'll drop it here, though.

"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continuously stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?"

Heh. Guilty as charged.

Susan... The very idea that you think you could say anything dim-witted reminds me of how I felt when we first met at LAcon in 2006.

Susan, Serge, Paul: What?

Actually we had a pretty good day; only two people asked me about my height, I fixed the laminator I jammed yesterday, was trained on the computer system and had a fairly productive time with a top class and a bottom class.

My sense of humour over height will hopefully reappear when comments on it drop to normal background level. Which admittedly is about 5 times a week.

Neil,
I actually do understand. I used to get similar comments, though not about my height, and found it equally aggravating.

My incurably gutter-frequenting mind caused me to blink several times at your two classes before realizing what "top" and "bottom" presumably mean in that context.

I will be taller myself tonight, by the way, since my new boots have come in, so I'll have to try them on and prance around in them for awhile. I just hope they fit - my calves are rather, um, sturdy. I got the black stretch patent ones, so hopefully between the stretch and the lacing I can manage to squeeze into them.

(These are for a Repo costume, by the way. Not that I need an excuse to buy boots.)

The boots remind me of a worldcon masquerade presentation I once saw. I think that was at 2003's in Baltimore.

2003 was Torcon. Baltimore's were 1983 and 1998. Which presentation?

I am 5'5"/165 cm.

Neil: You aren't the tallest person I kind of know. One of my brothers-in-law is somewhere between 6'7" and 6'9" (over 2 m): my husband says he can't remember exactly and it's difficult to tell because he tends to slouch.

By contrast, my husband is a mere 6'3"/190.5 cm. My son is also around that, although we think he's still slightly shorter (I have no idea where he got his height, since there aren't tall people on either side of his family). One of the requirements we had for a house was for them to be able to stand up in the basement.

Physical attributes aren't something I comment on unless there's a good reason (e.g. a person I'm talking to brought it up). Then again, I don't tend to say much even if there is reason.

Susan... Oops. I meant the worldcon of 1983.

Carol,
I will be happy to stand next to your husband and son, too.

I'm always glad when you say something here!

Serge,
...and which presentation? The big ones that stuck in my mind in 1983 were the "Turn of a Friendly Card" group and, I think, "Demon Lords of Darkness" - was that 1983? (You were in it, right?)

I'm the tallest in the family that spawned me. I got that from my maternal grandfather, and certainly not from my father, who could have been mistaken for Al Pacino's uncle. I am definitely the tallest person in the family I married into. My 2-year-old nephew Theo loved it I when picked him up and held so far up that he could touch the ceiling.

I'm glad that the kids are curious and unafraid and self-confident enough to talk to me and ask me things. I just wish they didn't all ask about my height every time.

For one thing (reminded by Carol) I'm not the tallest person I know. I do have tall people on both sides, although my maternal Grandmother was about 5'2". My Mum and my uncle are both tall, which makes me wonder how big they were when they were born, especially as I held the record for heaviest baby born at the maternity hospital for 2 years and 2 months, until my brother turned up.

Those boots are... extraordinary. As for the classes, I could use their designations (10y1 and 11z1) to avoid, um, confusing you, but that that will make no sense to anyone but me.

All my height comes from a maternal great-grandfather, my mother's father's father, who apparently was very tall, though I don't remember this personally, he having died when I was a toddler. My father's side of the family is average to short, and my maternal grandmother is no more than average height. But my maternal grandfather, my mother's brother, my cousin, and my sister and I are all unusually tall relative to the rest of the family.

The most dramatic demonstration of the power of good late 20th-century nutrition is that at least two of my great-grandmothers were under 5' tall. One of them had - brace yourself - THIRTEEN children with the aforementioned very tall great-grandfather. They must have been a rather odd-looking couple.

I can't remember off the top of my head if the tall great-grandfather is the one of (extremely diluted) Cherokee descent or whether that was his (short) wife.

(Is it better that we're now talking about our heights rather than yours, Neil?)

Is "extraordinary" good or bad? I want someone to like my boots.

We like your boots.

Serge:
You and I like my boots, apparently. Not sure about anyone else.

(I will like them better if I find out I can actually get my legs into them. Right now it's the sort of abstract like of someone who has not yet physically engaged with, or even set eyes on, her boots.)

Should there be insertion problems, Susan, there is probably an old-style shoemaker someowhere in town who could tinker with your boots, right?

That would take a lot of tinkering. I do have a very good shoe repair person, but that would be more like completely remaking the boots.

Serge: Cobblers.

I like the boots fine. I just have difficulty imagining them actually being worn.

That may be related to the urge I have to say "Are those boots school uniform young lady? No, I don't think so either. I don't want to see them again."

Meanwhile, here's a picture of me Being Tall.

(I should probably say I do want to see them again, but not in school)

Neil... Maybe in the movie "Catholic High-school Girls in Trouble"?

Neil,
What else are you doing in that picture besides being tall? Some kind of tug-of-war with canes?

My package haul today contained not merely boots but also a fabulous hat and an antique croquet set I got on eBay for $20.00. (It cost more to ship it from Michigan than it did for the set itself!) I am hovering over it all like a dragon with its hoard. Soon I will progress to trying things on.

Cobbler.
I stand corrected.

The tinkering I was thinking of would involve cutting the top open in the back, with laces to keep things in place. Mind you, this may be totally unnecessary, but I am a computer programmer, which means planning for eventualities.

Note that I didn't make it to Catholic high school. I was thrown out of Catholic kindergarten.

Paul: What?

It was intended as an expression of sympathy, although not, I admit, a very lucid one.

I have boots!
I have hat!

In a fit of on-topic madness I have decided that the followup belongs in the Repo thread, so see that thread for picture link. :)

Susan... I was thrown out of Catholic kindergarten.

Within one week of my beginning to go to school, I got in trouble with the nun teaching us. My going "Yay!" at the very end of a school day just didn't fly.

Serge,
I had problems at school, resulting in my parents being asked to please send me elsewhere, and then soon after problems at catechism school or whatever they call the weekday classes that prepare you for first communion (I called them "Monday school" after "Sunday school," but I was about six years old.) At school the problems were academic-behavioral, which is to say I was smart and bored to tears and complained about it. At catechism the problems were what might be termed philosophical and resulted in me being labeled the spawn of the devil. At that point my parents decided we were going to become UU, so I never got to that first communion. At the time I was disappointed primarily in not getting to have a fancy dress. But I was relieved to be free of the nuns.

Neil,
I've provided an assist to your imagination via a link in the Repo thread comments.

Susan... I was relieved to be free of the nuns

My wife, having been raised as a Protestant, found the world of nuns weirdly fascinating, at least in stories like Agnès of God. On the other hand, for someone like yours truly, it's hard to find nuns fascinating when your fingers have experienced the rod and the blackboard eraser. (Which is why I laughed so much at the sight of the psychic nun in The Blues Brothers.)

What am I doing? It's some time ago, but I think we're posing with the canes in front of a light so they look all mystical and glowy. It could have been an attempt at the cover of a bad Urban Fantasy novel. Some people who weren't there at the time saw it with the caption "The Dance Police ignite their truncheons before looking for miscreants" but that was somewhat in-jokey. What was happening was we were having a silly evening playing with cameras and a video camera.

My going "Yay!" at the very end of a school day just didn't fly.

I had drifted onto the topic of Exam Technique today when the bell went for lunch. I finished my sentence, and was surprised to see four faces sitting still watching me rather than disappearing out the door. "That's the lunch bell. You can go if you want."
[2 or 3 seconds pass]
"No, really, you do want to. I'll talk about this again nearer exam time."

I've not managed to have anyone eager to stay when the end of school bell goes though. Yet.

Holding their attention to within ten minutes of any bell is pretty impressive. Congratulations!

I am impressed too, Neil.

By the way, aside from that incident of my youth, all the way thru school, I was often one of the few students, when not the only one, who enjoyed learning. Most of my teachers liked that. Just not nuns.

I enjoyed learning. My objection was that I wasn't learning anything.

Susan... I wasn't learning anything.

Hopefully someone realized that the 'problem' was that you were way too smart and found a school better suited to your needs. Either that or they got out of the way whenever you sought knowledge.

Well, they sent me to a child psychologist, who diagnosed a serious case of brains. After that I was more appropriately placed in an ungraded elementary school where I could work at my own pace.

*grave voice* We're sorry... your daughter has... brains! It's untreatable.

I loved learning as a kid, too, but only if it was something that I was interested in. Actually, I'm still that way.

Coming soon on the SciFi Channel...
Susan de Guardiola's A Serious Case of Brains!
The horror. The horror!

I'm glad that your family did something about your serious case of brains. By the way, didn't you once say elsewhere that nuns thought you were Satan's spawn?

She had Satan brains! Even worse!

(That could also be on SciFi Channel)

Serge,
That was the catechism-class nuns, on the philosophical issue, as opposed to the Montessori school nuns, on the behavioral/academic issue. Separate issues, though it was using my brain that got me into trouble in catechism class, too. That inspired my parents to pull us completely out of Catholicism and thus make my life mostly nun-free.

AJ,
I love learning nearly anything. It's the only reason I can stand having a day job. Yesterday I went to a class on neoplasia more or less for fun and received the memorable information that colon cancer can look like a sort of reddish-brown Chia pet. Or possible a rotted cauliflower. There was a slide, and it's not a bad comparison. This was almost as memorable as the time the green icing on a cake was compared to the velvety green mucosa of the gallbladder.

I am quite happy that, when I underwent a colonoscopy about 2 years ago, no Chia Pet was found. The worst part of the whole affair were the previous 48 or 72 hours before, due to my diet having to consist of nothing but beef bouillon and chicken broth. I was awake during the whole procedure, but they'd given me a drug that messes with short-term memory, which means I have no memory of any discomfort experience, because there is no experience recorded. That was quite interesting. Men shouldn't put this off, when they're above a certain age. They do because, well, real men aren't supposed to have someone go in there. Silly people. I was amused that the colonoscopy was done by Doctor Ming, who was not Merciless.

Susan... my life mostly nun-free

Ever thought of doing a masquerade presentation called "Creatures of Habit"? You'd be quite a sight as the Singeing Nun, especially with those boots you recently acquired.

Serge:
You'd be quite a sight as the Singeing Nun

In a word: no.

Colonoscopy:
I think most people - not just men - put it off because overall it's an un-fun experience (both the prep and the actual event) and because hiding one's head in the sand about cancer risk means not having to hear any potential bad news. I'm three months overdue for a repeat mammogram for similar reasons, so it's not just this test.

I know more than I ever wanted to about colonoscopies because I spent some time working for an GI specialist who did 'em every week. I had to schedule the patients and describe the prep to them.

I'm struggling with appropriate boundaries yet again, so I'll just stop there.

*grave voice* We're sorry... your daughter has... brains! It's untreatable.

There is the experimental zombie treatment. It's a little drastic though.

Oh, and the class who needed to be encouraged to leave were probably fooled by my sleight of hand; they thought that when I stopped the lesson with five minutes to go we were now chatting, while I thought I was getting feedback and introducing some extra material that didn't fit with the rest of the lesson.

That actually makes it even more impressive. And I do speak from some knowledge; I taught secondary English briefly and unsatisfyingly, and spent a year as an intern in a HS math classroom while earning my M.S.Ed. (I ended up with the math teacher because I was the only intern who was able to handle math. Pitiful.) That was how I realized that I really liked teaching, I just didn't want to teach high school English. If I could get certified in math without going back for another 30 credits of coursework (ten semester-long classes) I'd be tempted. My fadeout after the beginning of calculus wouldn't matter for what I'd need to do at any level short of top high school students. But being good at lower-level maths and good at teaching doesn't matter around here if you don't have the college credits. It's frustrating.

Susan... In a word: no.

Nun at all?
Too bad.
I picture Neil as Fryer Tuck. Or maybe as superstrong Bench Priest.

Neil... There is the experimental zombie treatment

I find myself thinking of Heinlein's time travel story All You Zombies.

I think having my brains eaten would not be an entirely satisfactory solution, assuming I wanted a solution. I think becoming a heretic was a perfectly good way to resolve the situation, myself without any gory moments.

One nice thing about being an heretic in the modern western world is that it doesn't necessarily lead to severe bodily damage, when not to outright barbequeuing.

I really was under the impression I'd commented on this thread. Something about TV Guide giving the killer's name away in the credits ("Surprise Murderer ... Jack Albertson"). Now I'm totally perfused.

Colonoscopy. Ah. I'll be having one of those this coming week. By a great coincidence, I had a case of diarrhea that greatly resembles the final stages of a prep kit for a colonoscopy, running (ack) from Tuesday almost until today. Cathy helpfully suggested calling the med center and telling them I was already prepped.

Now STAY, comment! Stay!

Kip W - I think your spoiler comments were on the review to the sequel to this novel The Inner Circle.

She had Satan brains! Even worse!

(That could also be on SciFi Channel)

Then I'd have to have my brains eaten by a giant rubber shark before I turned into a human-sized mosquito.

(My experiences with SciFi: few but extremely...memorable.)

I have this day been told of a sublimely awful B-movie that I missed last night at Lunacon. I plan to rectify this error within the week.

Kip:
One Swedish crime novel post is much like another.

Susan...

Or into a human-sized praing mantis?
Coming soon... Susantis!

Yeah, most of SciFi's movies... ah... suck. There have been exceptions, like the dragon movie that used Chinese dragons. Another was Riverworld, which did what it could with Farmer's novels on a TV budget, and it did give us the scene of Lewis Carrol's Alice wearing a funny hat and using a giant mallet to get Mark Twain's riverboat engine unstuck.

Kip W... Wau off topic. Did you ever find that Jon Carrol column about his daughter adopting that little girl from China? He calls her Alice in his San Francisco Chronicle epistolaries even though that's not her real name and it just now occurred to me why he chose that name.

Serge,
I liked the first Riverworld book enough that I avoided seeing what SciFi did to it. That book got me interested in Richard Francis Burton.

Well, there were major differences in the movie, not the least of which is that Burton was replaced by a modern-day astronaut. And there are horses. Oh, and Mark Twain's huge prehistoric buddy is nowhere to be seen. I can understand why they made those changes, due to their having to fit a lot of stuff within less than 2 hours. Personally, I'd have preferred a mini-series, but I thought they did a decent job. By the way, I loved the first books, especially To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat. The fourth book though, with its big battle that goes on and on for what felt like a hundred pages, not so much. Also, the resolution to the Mystery felt like a letdown. Mind you, that was my personal reaction.

Serge,
Yeah, that all sounds about like why I didn't want to watch it. What fun is it if they take Burton out?

I don't think I got as far as book four; I thought it went downhill fairly quickly after the first book.

For me it went downriver later, but I'm relieved that I'm not the only person who felt that way. As for Burton's replacement... The character acted the same very driven way, although he didn't use the Suicide Express. I expect that they made that change because, since he was from our own time period, he was the character that audiences could identify with.

I know that I'd been reading about various attempts at a big-screen adaptations for decades. Maybe someone one day will try again and take the LoTR approach of one movie every 12 months although I'd condense books 3-4-5 into one movie.

I can more easily identify with a 19thc explorer than with a modern astronaut. And RFB was a really interesting person. I went and looked for a biography and some of his writing after I read TYSBG. So for me, removing him sort of wrecks the entire thing.

I once saw a 1970s miniseries about Burton, and he certainly was an interesting character. Here was someone who translated "1001 Nights" with the naughty stuff still in, and he married a very strict Christian? I'd have preferred to have him used in the movie, but would the average viewer have felt the same way? Also, without the astronaut, there'd have been no viewer-contemporary character of importance, not if they wanted to keep the cast to a manageable level. That's movies for you. They are the results of compromises.

That seems to boil down to suggesting it was dumbed down for average viewers. I am not average. So it's good that I didn't bother.

(And really, since when is having a viewer-contemporary character important in SF? Star Wars didn't have one, and I vaguely recall it being fairly successful.)

Most SF is usually dumbed down, by the time it makes it to the movie/TV/computer screen, if only because a reader is usually quite knowledgeable about the traditions and history of SF. That's why I don't watch SF, even Doctor Who, the same way I read it.

As for viewer-contemporary characters... It was just my theory as to why they replaced Burton. I may be completely wrong. As for Star Wars, you are right, but all its characters belong in that setting, it is normal for them. Meanwhile, in Riverworld, everybody is, literally, a fish out of water, and the audience may need someone it can relate to. I suspect that, unlike you and I, they can more easily relate to a contemporary character than to historical characters. (Speaking of which, Twain is the character I related the most to, for various reasons.)

By the way, did you know that the Riverworld was inspired by a fantasy novel called A Riverboat on the Styx? It's set in the Afterlife, as you probably guessed, and Mark Twain is the pilot of the titular riverboat.

I don't know that SF has to be dumbed down, but I'm unable to come up with a counterexample. I know you need a lot less story than your average novel -- someone or other said that a movie basically gets in about as much as a short story, which is one of the reasons Watchmen was considered unfilmable. But if one's adapting a novel, I'd rather see it narrowed down and material eliminated than have them add entirely new characters.

But of course no one asks my opinion about these things when they go about adapting things. Even the authors don't really get much vote once they sell the rights.

My google-fu has failed to find anything about a book called A Riverboat on the Styx, though a lot of jazz sites are coming up. Can you point me toward more information? It sounds interesting.

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