Coldstream Sci-vic Week
Wednesday, 30. July 2008, 11:07:29
In honour of the Coldstream Civic Week I’m not attending, next week - 4th to 10th August - shall be a special week devoted to feeding my inner Sci-Fi nut all the Sci-Fi it can handle. After a few weeks of markedly increased social activity, next week will see me disconnecting telephones, locking the front door and posting vicious, discouraging notices on my front gate and door along the lines of:
“F*** Off, World: My neglected soul and I are cheerfully pretending you don’t exist.”
I won't be taking any time off work but I won't be meeting anyone afterwards either.
The other and possibly only legitimate reason for this celebration is the imminent arrival of two pieces of SF media, one of which has been several years in the making:
1) The Hidden Empire series – book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, by Kevin J Anderson.
The keener-eyed among you will have noticed the shiny numeral in that title and yes, just as with those dreadfully written but massively popular books about some spotty wizard and his chums, this number seven is also the last in the series.
Across the six previous novels, one per year, I’ve been through an epic space opera set on a variety of worlds, populated by a diverse cast of interesting characters all threatened by a slightly-clichéd-but-still-fairly-cool collection of aliens, monsters, evil politicians and killer robots. By the end of book six, we’d begun to see the forces of goodness finally standing tall and booting evil squarely in the rump. There are, however, a few loose ends running about - some large, some small - who’s rumps are, as yet, un-booted...
This is MY Harry Potter moment, so I intend to have the tear-eyed fun you all had last year before you found out that Snape kills Dumbledore. (Is it too late to ruin the plot for anyone? Oh, shame...). I won’t be queuing from midnight outside Waterstones – I’m doing what the smarter Potter-ites did and ordering through Amazon – but I will be giggling and squealing like a girl when I tear open the package.
Also en route from Amazon is
2) Stargate Atlantis: Complete Season 4
The second best sci-fi series that I currently collect (BSG = 1, Doctor Who is in 3rd) reaches Season 4 on DVD. I
don’t watch it on TV for the simple reason I’m of the firm opinion TV is a dying medium and just isn’t worth shelling out whatever exorbitant price per month Sky are charging these days for another hundred or so channels of moronic garbage that I’ll flick through constantly until I throw the remote away in disgust before finding the few priceless twinkling programming gems I would actually watch. (SKY TV killed British telly, you know, leaving only the shambling corpse-like remnant to stagger along chewing people’s brains away with endless reality shows, shows about making money through whatever medium (houses, entrepeneurial enterprise) and a plethora of aggravating celebrity cooks)
*deepbreath/popsquicktablet*
Yes, so, season three ended - as most series do - on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Ancient city of Atlantis lost in space having narrowly escaped a deadly energy beam death ray fired at them by a super-powerful colony of humaniform robotic intelligences known as Replicators, who the Atlantis team met and managed to royally irritate several episodes earlier. Proactively bombing their homeworld in the finale (in the name of protection) didn’t do much to help ease tensions either, he says wagging a stern finger at the US military, although that 90-second long shot of the cluster-nuke falling through the atmosphere was sheer CGI sex.
Season four has apparently suffered a little in terms of quality, what with all that Writer’s Strike business that happened in the US (something about them not getting paid for stuff they do on the internet which is identical to the stuff they do for telly but without the cheery wage packet at the end) but I’m looking forward to it anyway, although replacing Dr Weir – the lovely, very capable and very moral civilian leader of Atlantis since the show’s beginning - with Col. Samantha Carter, a refugee from the whoops-just-finished Stargate SG1 is bound to piss me off as much as it did when I first heard about it two years ago.
Her hair is apparently shit for the whole year, too (Ha! Take that, Amanda Tapping!). But I hear they got rid of her as well, now, in Season five for the crime of being dreadfully dull so at least I can take heart from her being a temporary fixture. Oh, but wait! Now that they've killed the Atlantis Doctor with the laughable scottish accent they're replacing him with actress Jewel Staite, known and revered among SF geeks for her portrayal of Kaylee in Joss Whedon's legendary and cruelly cancelled series, Firefly - hurrah!
Anyhoo, it should be great, and even bad SG:A can’t be any worse than the depths of fantastical willy-waving Doctor Who has been mining recently. (Don’t ask – I might tell you...)
4th of August, folks. Can’t wait.
“F*** Off, World: My neglected soul and I are cheerfully pretending you don’t exist.”
I won't be taking any time off work but I won't be meeting anyone afterwards either.
The other and possibly only legitimate reason for this celebration is the imminent arrival of two pieces of SF media, one of which has been several years in the making:
1) The Hidden Empire series – book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, by Kevin J Anderson.
The keener-eyed among you will have noticed the shiny numeral in that title and yes, just as with those dreadfully written but massively popular books about some spotty wizard and his chums, this number seven is also the last in the series. Across the six previous novels, one per year, I’ve been through an epic space opera set on a variety of worlds, populated by a diverse cast of interesting characters all threatened by a slightly-clichéd-but-still-fairly-cool collection of aliens, monsters, evil politicians and killer robots. By the end of book six, we’d begun to see the forces of goodness finally standing tall and booting evil squarely in the rump. There are, however, a few loose ends running about - some large, some small - who’s rumps are, as yet, un-booted...
This is MY Harry Potter moment, so I intend to have the tear-eyed fun you all had last year before you found out that Snape kills Dumbledore. (Is it too late to ruin the plot for anyone? Oh, shame...). I won’t be queuing from midnight outside Waterstones – I’m doing what the smarter Potter-ites did and ordering through Amazon – but I will be giggling and squealing like a girl when I tear open the package.
Also en route from Amazon is
2) Stargate Atlantis: Complete Season 4
The second best sci-fi series that I currently collect (BSG = 1, Doctor Who is in 3rd) reaches Season 4 on DVD. I
don’t watch it on TV for the simple reason I’m of the firm opinion TV is a dying medium and just isn’t worth shelling out whatever exorbitant price per month Sky are charging these days for another hundred or so channels of moronic garbage that I’ll flick through constantly until I throw the remote away in disgust before finding the few priceless twinkling programming gems I would actually watch. (SKY TV killed British telly, you know, leaving only the shambling corpse-like remnant to stagger along chewing people’s brains away with endless reality shows, shows about making money through whatever medium (houses, entrepeneurial enterprise) and a plethora of aggravating celebrity cooks)*deepbreath/popsquicktablet*
Yes, so, season three ended - as most series do - on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Ancient city of Atlantis lost in space having narrowly escaped a deadly energy beam death ray fired at them by a super-powerful colony of humaniform robotic intelligences known as Replicators, who the Atlantis team met and managed to royally irritate several episodes earlier. Proactively bombing their homeworld in the finale (in the name of protection) didn’t do much to help ease tensions either, he says wagging a stern finger at the US military, although that 90-second long shot of the cluster-nuke falling through the atmosphere was sheer CGI sex.
Season four has apparently suffered a little in terms of quality, what with all that Writer’s Strike business that happened in the US (something about them not getting paid for stuff they do on the internet which is identical to the stuff they do for telly but without the cheery wage packet at the end) but I’m looking forward to it anyway, although replacing Dr Weir – the lovely, very capable and very moral civilian leader of Atlantis since the show’s beginning - with Col. Samantha Carter, a refugee from the whoops-just-finished Stargate SG1 is bound to piss me off as much as it did when I first heard about it two years ago.
Her hair is apparently shit for the whole year, too (Ha! Take that, Amanda Tapping!). But I hear they got rid of her as well, now, in Season five for the crime of being dreadfully dull so at least I can take heart from her being a temporary fixture. Oh, but wait! Now that they've killed the Atlantis Doctor with the laughable scottish accent they're replacing him with actress Jewel Staite, known and revered among SF geeks for her portrayal of Kaylee in Joss Whedon's legendary and cruelly cancelled series, Firefly - hurrah!
Anyhoo, it should be great, and even bad SG:A can’t be any worse than the depths of fantastical willy-waving Doctor Who has been mining recently. (Don’t ask – I might tell you...)
4th of August, folks. Can’t wait.
WIDGETIZE
Coldstream leads them all, leads them all!
By GoldBug, # 30. July 2008, 15:14:27
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By GoldBug, # 30. July 2008, 15:49:13