eating cucumbers without permission...

Paradise Lost

ADAM: Paradise has arbitrary dietary restrictions?

DEVIL: They're really more like guidelines.

GOD: Incorrect.

An intriguing look at speculative fiction which asks, "what if Hitler had won?"

Reviewed in the Grauniad, even! I love the Internet.

So, whose book is the biggest? The controversy will soon be put to rest, possibly for all time, when writer Richard Grossman installs his 3 million-page novel Breeze Avenue on a remote mountain in Kaha, Hawaii. Although it is unclear how many words Breeze Avenue comprises, an educated guess puts the count at over 1 billion.

As we always feared, without finishing The Wheel of Time.

But when I checked the 1877 translation against the original my heart sank. It was garbage. On almost every page the English translator, whoever he, or she, was (their name is not recorded), collapsed Verne's actual dialogue into a condensed summary, missed out sentences or whole paragraphs. She or he messed up the technical aspects of the book. She or he was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne, and tended to translate what were in the original fairly neutral phrases such as "...said Isaac Hakkabut" with idioms such as "...said the repulsive old Jew." And at one point in the novel she or he simply omitted an entire chapter (number 30) - quite a long one, too - presumably because she or he wasn't interested in, or couldn't be bothered to, turn it into English.

One might go so far as to say that the Hugo award for best novel has always gone primarily to space opera, as currently defined, though many of the earlier winners, up to the end of the 1970s, would have been mortally offended to have their books so-labelled. Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating not a subgenre or mode at all, but the worst form of formulaic hackwork: really bad SF.

I'm not surprised: they're already the worst bookseller by far in my local market. If they buy the Borders stores then they'll probably ruin them too.

If the photos were better I'd probably be reading it right now...

After the quality of the last couple of books, I thought that spoilers, even fake ones, couldn't possibly make my expectations for this one any lower. I was wrong.

Finally got around to reading it -- thousand-page novels always look daunting -- and was utterly delighted. It's up there with the very best fantasy novels I've ever read.

Bonus link: Crooked Timber "seminar", including a long response by the author.

We've all heard about spammers exploiting CAPTCHA-solving users for evil; reCAPTCHA does the same on the side of good, getting users to transcribe scanned text for book digitization projects. Great idea!

Day before my birthday!