Of dandelions and reunions

I have a headache. Mainly because the weather is totally awesome :|. It seems that I've inherited my mum's ability to sprout a headache when spending significant amounts of time in hot sunshine without some kind of head covering. Oh well. One gets older... On the upside, Trondheim in nice summer weather is really pretty!

But let's back up a bit. May has been a month of a fair bit of travelling for me. First there was a work trip to the UK. (Yes! Those have started happening again. And while I'm happy that Covid is slowly relinquishing its grasp on the world, I still feel travel is more fun when not for work.) Heathrow was a bit of a nightmare with delays and such, but otherwise it was reasonable, as far as these things go.

The week after, when we were visiting the in-laws for a weekend of gathering and celebration, the Heathrow experience was curiously smooth! (Maybe they figured how I feel about leisure travel vs work travel!!) The weather was great! We met loads of people we hadn't met in some years. Ate loads of great food :). There was even time to actually relax and enjoy some quiet time with family.

Then we were back home for a week, and off again on a long awaited visit to mid-Norway, visiting friends! Rørvik is one of those places that when you mention to people you're going there (assuming they know of its existence) are likely to respond with why?! Of course, seeing good friends we hadn't seen in ages is probably a good enough reason to go anywhere, but the place was really nice too!

Norway is a very long country though, so driving halfway up it was a task best split in two. We stopped for a night in Trondheim on the way there for a preview. Even managing to meet up with some friends who were headed to Rørvik using other modes of transport! The next day we met yet other friends who were headed the same way on the ferry on route (although we promptly lost them as soon as we were off the ferry).

Finally, when we did make it there, it was to much excitement and joy :). I was particularly excited that the kids were as excited to see us as we were to see them. Three years is a long time when you're 12 :). The weather, while indulgent, wasn't exactly out and out glorious. But it still allowed us enough opportunities to explore a bit. Most of the time though was spent catching up!

So now we are back in Trondheim again. Norway's capital back in the Viking times, it's well known today for the largest technical university in Norway. Which means that a majority of Norwegians I know have spent some time up here :). We'd long heard about its awesome restaurants and great vibes, so it seemed like a good idea to spend two nights instead of one before heading back.

The weather, as I mentioned at the top of the post, has been exceptionally gorgeous. And we've spent it exploring, dozing on random bits of grass and trying out some of the famed food. So far, it has all been really great! (If only I'd remembered my hat.)

In between all the travelling, we finally managed to go out on the bikes. But then I promptly had a puncture courtesy of a particularly sharp piece of grit :(. Oh well, hopefully some more summer cycling will happen in June, July and beyond.

On the book front it feels like it's been a while since I've read anything. But that's probably because there hasn't been time to read lately :). Dune Messiah didn't really change my mind in the last few hundred pages. Although, I had this distinct feeling that had there not been the same sense of foreboding throughout the whole book, I may actually have enjoyed it a bit?! I guess we'll never know.

I figured it was time to take a brief break from sci-fi and read the book club book. Which this month was Olga. I enjoyed it quite a lot actually! There were many layers to the book, I felt. Once again, as a book translated into English, it's hard to say how much of the original feel to the story has carried over. Overall though, both the style and the story seemed really interesting.

Since then I've jumped back into the world of sci-fi. This time, in the form of the strange and wonderful world of Culture. As a series, it seems more Asimov than Malazan, in that, subsequent books don't happen immediately one after another, and often with a different cast of characters. I'm nearly done with the first book, and Consider Phlebas is an excellent advertisement for the late Iain M Banks. Courtesy of a friend, I do have the rest of the nine volumes sitting behind the sofa, just waiting to be read :D.

Spice, dreams and fragments in blue

Another month seems to have disappeared at light speed. This time, the most significant thing for me personally was finally catching Covid-19 :(. Got to experience most of the milder symptoms for a couple of days. But thankfully beyond a bit of residual tiredness that has been about it since.

Before that though, there was the very nice Easter week with lovely weather and visitors! As usual for much of the week Norway more or less shut down, so we spent a lot of time outdoors. The ice cover that has since completely disappeared from the lakes was still very much in evidence. But flowers and green leaves were starting to make their way through.

Now, usually I hold the view that the plant life here waits for the National Day (17th May) before exploding forth, but this year spring seems to have come early! There's noticeable amounts of green more or less everywhere you look and the crocuses have come and gone, to be replaced by a variety of colourful flowers everywhere. The one downside I suppose is that it's been rather dry. Maybe there'll be some welcome rain soon.

Speaking of dry, finally got around to Dune! And what an experience that was :). But first I did finish Rejoice. To be honest, the latter half of the book didn't do much to change my initial impression. Which is not that I disliked it exactly... It just left much to be desired as a sci-fi book.

I suppose lately we've read enough books at book club that are of the thought-provoking and sometimes philosophical nature, so this one fits right in with that. I had just hoped that there would be more character. As in character building, interesting protagonists, interplay of individuals and relationships. All that things that made The Book of the Fallen such a treat. I guess this was just a totally different book.

The feeling remains that this was more or less a vehicle for Erikson to just get his opinions on politics, the environment, morality to some extent and a variety of other topics across. I mean, don't get me wrong, the premise of the story itself is kinda interesting. But there's not that much story going on, and whatever there is, is just smothered in the rest of it.

Moving on to Dune, then, was positively mesmerizing! (I have to mention here, that I'm already a third of the way into the second book, Dune Messiah, and that may somewhat colour my opinion of the first book. I will, however, try to recapture the actual feeling of awe and amazement that accompanied my reading Dune itself!)

It's been interesting how the rather diverse books I've been reading lately nonetheless have threads connecting them. There was the pure exploration of space and its impact on the human being that tied in the Weir books to The Remembrance... series. Then the more social and cultural themes that connected Remembrance... to Rejoice. And finally themes of ecological balance, interdependence and in some cases chaos that thread together Rejoice and Dune. Or maybe it's just that in reading one after the next my mind builds these connections.

Frank Herbert, however, takes the reader on a very interesting journey in the way the story unfolds. There's almost a sense of detached wonder as the perspectives shift swiftly from one character to another. I've never read anything quite like this before. You get to feel like you're in each character's head as the story unfolds, and yet Herbert manages to keep secrets, surprises, twists if the plot!

I will, I think, forever wonder if the book would have been a very different experience had I not seen the film before. (This being the new 2021 film.) I suppose the answer must be yes, but I'll never know quite what sort of a different experience it might have been. For anyone reading this who still has a choice, my unequivocal advice would be to read the book first :).

It's not that the film isn't good. It's just that the way the story unfolds in the book is so unique, there's no way any film can really do justice to it. Having seen the visual treatment in the film though, and knowing some of the facts, that colours how you read the book. To be sure, things in the film don't happen quite like they do in the book, so there's plenty of room for discovery.

The same thing is true of the way very early in the book (and this happens in Dune Messiah as well), the reader is pretty much given a blueprint of how the story is going to unfold. Luckily, that does not stop things from being interesting still! After all, there's things none of the characters know :).

I feel as though Dune is a book I will happily re-read. There seem to be aspects of the world, the characters, the story itself that I haven't yet fully grasped. There is more to explore, savour. Can't say I can say the same about Dune Messiah. But I think I'll actually finish it before I say more about that :).

We're now moving into the part of the year where traditionally travel dominates the agenda. After a couple of years of everything being turned on its head, some level of normalcy seems to be creeping back. A few long overdue visits are planned. We shall see how it all goes down.

And all the while we continue to pray for Ukraine.

A preview of summer

It's been a month that went by rather quickly. For a variety of reasons. There was a distinct feeling of drowning in work and sundry other things that tend to pile up slowly while one is not noticing till it all feels like a bit too much. So the holiday was timely. And very much appreciated!

Direct flights to a very popular destination for Norwegians were made good use of and a very relaxed and warm week in Gran Canaria ensued! I'd never really been to that part of the world before. In fact the closest I'd come would have been sailing out from the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. Which is not that close really.

We were staying on the south coast in a relatively quite part of the island, which was really nice. Good weather, great food, nice beaches and warmer pools :D. And to top it all off some of the family from the UK had made it over as well, so great company too!

I was particularly impressed by the variety in the beaches, rocks and boulders littering some, nice sand in others. And, in the case of the famous Playa del Maspalomas, quite an impressive expanse of sand dunes! The water felt a bit too cold for me to actually go for a swim though. Especially given those heated pools :).

Special mention has to be made of the hike to a hill top not too far away from where we were staying that Google Maps provides the name of in Norwegian :). The views were great too! Another highlight was the day spent on the slides at Aqualand north of Maspalomas! A bit of an active end to an otherwise very relaxed trip.

An upshot of the nearly six-hour long flight to Las Palmas, as well as the relaxed nature of the holiday meant that I managed to finish off the final book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. In short, there's a lot to take in with this series. Light reading it is not. There definitely was a lot of hard science, yet, as with all good writers, the science wasn't allowed to get in the way of the story. At least for me. There was also a lot of food for thought.

There are so many different threads to my feelings about these books though. It's quite hard to unpack it all, but I'm going to try anyway. Hopefully without too many spoilers, but please beware, there might be some.

One very interesting thing was how the original Chinese story surfaced in different ways at different points in the books. In many ways the first book The Three Body Problem, partly being set mostly in China and also with its heavy referencing of the cultural revolution at the very beginning makes this quite obvious. The latter two books, The Dark Forest and Death's End are progressively less and less tied to Chinese territory physically and yet the narrative is rich with a lot of social and cultural references.

One interesting thing I noticed was that two different translators have worked on the three volumes. One who did the first and last and another did the middle one. I'm not sure why, but I was much more comfortable reading the two volumes translated by Ken Liu than the one by Joel Martinson. Whether it was a different way of writing or just how the translation was being done... Or even the fact that The Dark Forest transitions from Earth to Space, so to speak.

(Interestingly enough, this week I found out that a friend had read the series, also in English, and had had the exact opposite experience. Although, he hadn't even realized that there were two different translators involved!)

As for the story itself, Liu Cixin definitely weaves a mesmerizing set of ideas together masterfully. A philosophy of civilizations seen through a prism I couldn't necessarily identify with myself, but one that was nonetheless fascinating to explore. The whole Dark Forest idea itself is a mind bender. And then there are the dimensional tricks which ultimately lead to the unspooling/zooming out of the timeline that left me rather breathless at the very end!

There was also an almost deliberate casualness with which protagonists were treated which I felt somewhat unsettled by. Appearing, disappearing, appearing again. In many ways this was particularly pronounced in Death's End since in the other two books one more or less follows a single protagonist.

To be fair, the same is also largely true with Death's End, but somehow the darting, speeding timeline made it harder for me to connect with Cheng Xin than it was with Luo Ji in The Dark Forest or Wang Miao in The Three Body Problem. I suppose there are also others, so one could argue if these three were indeed the primary protagonists at all. Maybe they were merely faces of humanity as it traversed the story. In many ways my favourite character was probably Da Shi anyway :).

So yeah. Happy that I read all the books. Probably never going to read them again (which means getting them from the library worked out quite well). Very different from anything I've read before. There are, nevertheless, echoes of some of  the ideas in this series that I feel I've come across elsewhere, and probably will again.

It was such a huge contrast starting Rejoice after Death's End that I actually had to take it easy for a few days. Just let all my swirling thoughts and feelings from Remembrance.. settle a bit :). Now that I'm properly getting into Steven Erikson's sci-fi though, I have to say it feels more like philosophy and satire wrapped in a thin layer of science. I guess probably best to give the man the final couple of hundred pages before jumping to too many conclusions, he is my favourite fantasy author after all :).

Of course, in a constant undercurrent to life, the war goes on. Each day I feel a little more used to it, which makes me feel a little more terrified. The missile strike that interrupted the Saudi GP though was a reminder that this is not the only one.

(Very very happy that Ferrari are doing well, by the way. Finally! Long may it continue. I'm not even going to say anything about Liverpool.)