from a war that was never fought. 🙂 I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model. 🙂
So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”
I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.
This past weekend, I attended Lunacon 50, a science fiction convention held annually in Rye, New York by the New York Science Fiction Society. I wanted to attend “a con” this year and I chose Lunacon because, of the Northeast conventions I could find online, it seemed the most writer-friendly and writer-centric. Appropriately, for the next few days, I’m going to type up my thoughts and impression.
Our story begins with an epic tale of travel and travail.
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Echelon
a novel
by Josh Conviser
InstaRating: 2 out of 5
This book\’s title caught my interest because I keep up with surveillance tech and its social implications, and ECHELON — the alleged US NSA electronic sifting program — is the monster of all surveillance programs. Although I knew this was a spy thriller, I thought there was a chance that it would delve deeply into some of the issues revolving around the invasive new technologies coming online. Alas, it didn’t pan out that way.
More below the fold — warning: Spoilers to come.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
by Max Brooks
InstaRating: 5 out of 5
After the debacle that was The Stonehenge Gate, I was looking for something good to read, to wash the taste of failed prose from my mouth. Happily I picked up this piece of psuedo-history. Written by the author of the offbeat, tongue-in-cheek The Zombie Survivor’s Guide, this book purports to be an oral history compiled and published ten years after the end of The Zombie War, a global outbreak of the undead as in The Night of the Living Dead.
Spoilers and more after the break.
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Oryx and Crake (a novel)
by Margaret Atwood
InstaRating: 4 out of 5
In brief: Snowman is the last (traditional) human alive in a world curiously empty. He bears the secret of what happened to civilization and slowly reveals it to himself as he watches over the successor species: humans carefully designed to thrive in the ecologically-devastated world of tomorrow.
Spoilers and a more complete review follow.
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