Flush it Friday: Books That Make You Feel Dumb
I’d heard lots of things about Peter Watts’ novel, Blindsight, before diving in myself: it’s weird, there are space vampires, it is unabashedly hard science fiction. I am an intelligent owl, I thought, shortly before being bombarded with technological concepts theorized in the ’60s that still utterly confound me. And that’s before antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion is mentioned. While speculative to some degree, every time I looked up some unknown phrase that I figured was technobabble, it led to a daunting Wiki spiral where I ended up looking at stuff like this:
This is a modified relativistic rocket equation, you dolt. You cretin. You absolute buffoon.
Of course, looking at that leaves me looking like this:
Fortunately, Watts is a gifted writer who can weave a story that, even if some of the hard sci fi concepts go over the audience’s heads, still makes for a good read full of thought-provoking ideas and truly alien climes. This book makes me feel stupid, but it earns it. Oh, would you look at the time…here comes my hourly daily Murakami rant! My ultimate pet peeve is when an author makes a story obtuse or opaque just for the sake of appearing deep and you just don’t get it man. Murakami is the Liturgy of fiction. Ok, rant off, cloud has been yelled at. Y’all ever get intellectually dunked by a book?
Carcassbomb soothed our aching wallets:
Spear primed us for the big S U C C with this Black Hole Deity premiere (this is a good thing):
BSG interviewed The Boxcar Suite, who are apparently not the Boxcar Children:
IGoM got us starry-eyed with his review of the newest from Nomadic Rituals:
G/B/Us. Do it for Bernie’s mittens, or whatever that Twitter website is salivating over at the time of this post. Grumble-grumble.
