Thursdays, huh?

This is the second week in a row that I have been slammed on my usual blog-Wednesday and ended up writing to you on Thursday. Not to mention that Twitter (a source of many ideas and articles and news updates for this blog) was on the fritz yesterday. The whole website was down.

Correction. The whole website is down. I just checked again.

So you're going to have to put up with late, news-less rantings from me. I know you're thrilled.

Well you'll get an in-progress book report from me. I'm currently reading Destiny's Road by Larry Niven (who I bumped into, sort of...he was in the same concert room as me at Dragon Con but he left before the band I was merchandising for went on stage...we did a little dance around each other when the first crowd was leaving...) who is one of the kings of the science fiction world. His name ranks up there with Isaac Asimov, Phillip K. Dick, and Ursula K. LeGuin.

He's the author of Ringworld, an incredibly popular and ground-breaking science fiction tale that joined the ranks of Hard Science Fiction (different than soft science fiction in that it has to be within the laws of physics and science; aka, not a space opera or Star Wars) in 1970. Not long after, the science fiction world threw the gauntlet at Niven, claiming that the book wasn't realistic. In response, he picked up that gauntlet and threw it back with Ringworld Engineers, a book dedicated to proving that the physics were sound.

"After the publication of Ringworld many fans identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. One major problem was that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, ultimately colliding with its sun and disintegrating. This led MIT students attending the 1971 Worldcon to chant, "The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!" Niven wrote the 1980 sequel in part to address these engineering issues."

In case you're still wondering, Ringworld is what inspired the game series Halo.

This is the first book by Niven that I've ever read, and I was warned beforehand that his books tend to be rather mature in content. Explicitly so. Well, this one has not been bad, in my eyes. It's certainly an adult book but I'm not needing to use bleach on my eyes or soap in my brain after every chapter. So feel free to read.

The story is about settlers who landed on an Earth-like planet 200-300 years ago and eked out an existence from the peninsula. A Road was formed by the shuttles hovering along over the land, burning out the ground. And spartan civilizations, some very rudimentary in technology, sprang up. But mysteries are everywhere. No one follows the road except for the merchants. No one asks where the Road goes. No one asks anything.

Jemmy, forced onto the Road by accident, is off to find out the answers to all his questions.

The writing style jumps around a lot. I'm just now entering part three, before which the biggest gaps in time were a few days or weeks. The leap from part two to part three, however, is 27 years without mention until later. I spent the first few pages wondering who I was reading about and where the last nearly three decades went. There are a lot of name changes too, as Jemmy becomes a fugitive and has to take cover. He changes names three or four times in the first two parts of the book. Also a tad confusing if you're not paying strict attention.

But I like it so far. It's a good, detailed book, paints vivid pictures of a strange life, draws you into the mystery of it. I can't wait to find out what the whole point is, what happened to the initial crews of the ships that led to the scattered lifestyles of the now-inhabitants of the planet who have so diversified a way of life-- some living like tribes, some like futuristic societies.

In other news, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug opens tonight.

I'm stupid excited.