Iain J Coleman (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} iainjcoleman) wrote,@ 2007-10-04 20:25:00 |
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Interests Meme
A cool interests meme frommckitterick:
Comment on this post asking for me to meme you, and I will choose seven interests from your profile. Then you make a post where you explain what those seven interests mean to you, why you are interested in them, and so on. Then post these instructions along with your answers so that others can play along.
Blake's 7
I have vague memories of the last series of B7 from when I was a kid. Mainly Servalan, people running around in sandpits shooting at each other, and me wondering why, if it was called "Blake's 7", there was no one called Blake in it. Then Blake turned up, and I thought "Hooray!" My joy was short-lived.
That was it until I was a postgrad at Glasgow University. At one of many drunken parties in the flat I shared, one of our friends put on the then newly-released VHS video of "Star One". I was instantly hooked. Avon slamming Blake's fanaticism, Blake's monomaniacal drive to justify his past failures with a desperate gamble, the twists and turns as the stakes get higher, and that wonderful exchange at the end, where our heroes prepare to face down an entire alien invasion fleet:
VILA: Avon, this is stupid!
AVON: When did that ever stop us?
I was hooked, but I didn't go out and buy all the tapes straight away. Instead, I found the B7 fan sites on this new "World Wide Web" thingy, read all the episode transcripts, and decided this was something I had to get more of. So not only did I eventually collect all four series, I joined the very lively B7 mailing list at lysator.se.
This had a significant effect on my life. It was my first entry to fandom: it got me participating in many conventions, and encouraged me to think about, and write about, a wider range of topics than I'd ever done before. More importantly, it introduced me to some of my dearest friends, including the Best Man at my forthcoming wedding.
e-science
I work for two organisations - the National e-Science Centre and the e-Science Institute - both of which are conveniently located in the same building in Edinburgh and share many of the same staff. So what is e-Science? It's the creation and exploitation of distributed computing infrastructure to enable sophisticated forms of scientific collaboration. It's also strictly only ever written with a lower case "e", necessitating various exercises in grammatical gymnastics to avoid starting a sentence with "e-Science".
glorantha
An astonishingly rich and detailed fantasy world. Glorantha is most closely associated with the roleplaying game Runequest, which was set in that world, but in fact Glorantha preceded the game and has been used as the setting for other roleplaying games, board wargames, and even novels. While many people have contributed to the fictional world, the principal creator is Greg Stafford. He began creating Glorantha as an exercise in mythology in the late 60s, and his characteristic blend of deep mythological structures and bizarre whimsy remains central to the Gloranthan style.
marillion
There was a progressive rock revival in Britain in the early 80s. As a movement it's pretty much forgotten, mainly because only one good band every came out of it, and one band does not a movement make. That band was Marillion, and they only seem to have a slightly less wanky name than their contemporaries Twelfth Night and Pendragon because they wisely dropped the Sil- from the start of their name at a very early stage.
Two things distinguished Marillion in the early days. One was their guitarist, Steve Rothery: an unassuming gentleman, but probably the most under-rated guitarist in rock history. The other was their imposing lead singer and lyricist, Fish (Derek Dick to his mum). Their early songs are musically very much the sum of their influences, from Genesis to Camel to Van Der Graaf Generator (of whom, more later), but Rothery's guitar work lifts it above the merely derivative, and Fish's lyrics, rooted in direct experience and made vivid by notes of sordid realism, are richer and more affecting than even his idol Peter Hammill had ever achieved.
Their high point, in my view, was their fourth album, Clutching at Straws. It's a dark and frankly autobiographical study of an alcoholic whose world is increasingly fractured and ambiguous, and who is becoming increasingly alienated from friends, family and society. It's bloody good. It was also the last Marillion album to feature Fish. He went on to a solo career, which I have followed with enthusiasm, while the remainder Marillion went off with a new singer into new musical territory that I was less interested in.
science fiction
As a kid, I loved Doctor Who. Still do. I used to get all the Target novelisations of the stories, and read them over and over again. Eventually a colleague of my dad's - I forget who - gave me a load of proper SF books that I guess he had finished with. It was pretty much a grab-bag of novels, short story collections and even anthologies of essays. Lots of Asimov and Clarke, plus some Sturgeon and various others. Clarke was my favourite: Report on Planet 3, Tales of Ten Worlds, Earthlight, A Fall of Moondust... At about the same time I also got - for Chistmas, I think - a hardback collection of SF novels including The Day of the Triffids, I Robot, and The Demolished Man. All great stuff - I loved the later Robot stories - but Bester just blew my tiny little mind. And, just to coincide with all of this, Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds was a big hit. I got the album - loved it, still do - read the novel with the tie-in cover, and at the same time the H.G. Wells story was being serialised in the back pages of Doctor Who Weekly.
So I became an SF fan. Unavoidable, under the circumstances. Fantasy followed, when I saw the Bakshi cartoon of Lord of the Rings on video, read the Fellowship at my friend Mark's house, then devoured the entire trilogy in a weekend when a distant cousin lent me his dog-eared copy. This continued throughout my teens, with novels, movies and roleplaying games.
I sort of drifted away from SF as a living literary form for a while. I often say that what put me off SF was doing a PhD in astrophysics, and it's only half a joke. So much SF just seemed to be presenting a dilute version of the sense of wonder that I could access in its pure form through science, and the hard, or hard-ish, SF that I had relished in my youth now seemed flat and uninspiring. I retained some enthusiasm for, broadly speaking, New Wave SF - Dick, Ballard, Moorcock - but I would hardly have called myself an SF fan.
I started getting back into it when I read Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal. It was new, fresh and exciting, and reawakened the taste for serious speculation expressed through a vibrant story. I'm enthusiastic about contemporary SF/Fantasy again, with authors like Stross, Kay and Stephenson bringing some of that mind-expanding spirit I first experienced with Asimov and Clarke, even if I am now a more critical reader.
I recently re-read the Foundation trilogy. It really is bollocks until the Mule turns up, isn't it? From then on, it's a pretty good story.
science writing
Well, it's my job. I'm the Science Writer at the National e-Science Centre / e-Science Institute (see above). The job mainly entails finding out about what science is going on using distributed computing, by attending workshops, conferences and what have you, and writing articles about it so as to inform the wider scientific community about what everyone is up to. It's very enjoyable. I left scientific research in part because I was sick of thinking about the same narrow problem every day for years: now I get to experience exciting research in every field from particle physics to performing arts, and then write articles about them that draw on my own education and interests to put this work into a wider intellectual context.
van der graaf generator
The forgotten masters of progressive rock, Van Der Graaf Generator produced some the most exciting and audacious rock music you could ever hear. They also created a fair bit of wank, to be honest, but that's a professional hazard of the genre. The essential Van Der Graaf Generator album is H to He, Who Am The Only One. The title is inspired by stellar nucleosynthesis, but that needn't detain us right now. Musically, the band is at its best in this album, with punchy, well-structured tracks that avoid the floppy self-indulgence of some of their other work. But it is singer and lyricist Peter Hammill who really shines here. He creates images of visceral horror in "The Emperor and his War Room", and flips effortlessly mid-phrase from hard rocking to choral transcendence in "Pioneers Over C". Give me ambition and audacity over conventional perfection any day.
A cool interests meme from
mckitterick:Comment on this post asking for me to meme you, and I will choose seven interests from your profile. Then you make a post where you explain what those seven interests mean to you, why you are interested in them, and so on. Then post these instructions along with your answers so that others can play along.
Blake's 7
I have vague memories of the last series of B7 from when I was a kid. Mainly Servalan, people running around in sandpits shooting at each other, and me wondering why, if it was called "Blake's 7", there was no one called Blake in it. Then Blake turned up, and I thought "Hooray!" My joy was short-lived.
That was it until I was a postgrad at Glasgow University. At one of many drunken parties in the flat I shared, one of our friends put on the then newly-released VHS video of "Star One". I was instantly hooked. Avon slamming Blake's fanaticism, Blake's monomaniacal drive to justify his past failures with a desperate gamble, the twists and turns as the stakes get higher, and that wonderful exchange at the end, where our heroes prepare to face down an entire alien invasion fleet:
VILA: Avon, this is stupid!
AVON: When did that ever stop us?
I was hooked, but I didn't go out and buy all the tapes straight away. Instead, I found the B7 fan sites on this new "World Wide Web" thingy, read all the episode transcripts, and decided this was something I had to get more of. So not only did I eventually collect all four series, I joined the very lively B7 mailing list at lysator.se.
This had a significant effect on my life. It was my first entry to fandom: it got me participating in many conventions, and encouraged me to think about, and write about, a wider range of topics than I'd ever done before. More importantly, it introduced me to some of my dearest friends, including the Best Man at my forthcoming wedding.
e-science
I work for two organisations - the National e-Science Centre and the e-Science Institute - both of which are conveniently located in the same building in Edinburgh and share many of the same staff. So what is e-Science? It's the creation and exploitation of distributed computing infrastructure to enable sophisticated forms of scientific collaboration. It's also strictly only ever written with a lower case "e", necessitating various exercises in grammatical gymnastics to avoid starting a sentence with "e-Science".
glorantha
An astonishingly rich and detailed fantasy world. Glorantha is most closely associated with the roleplaying game Runequest, which was set in that world, but in fact Glorantha preceded the game and has been used as the setting for other roleplaying games, board wargames, and even novels. While many people have contributed to the fictional world, the principal creator is Greg Stafford. He began creating Glorantha as an exercise in mythology in the late 60s, and his characteristic blend of deep mythological structures and bizarre whimsy remains central to the Gloranthan style.
marillion
There was a progressive rock revival in Britain in the early 80s. As a movement it's pretty much forgotten, mainly because only one good band every came out of it, and one band does not a movement make. That band was Marillion, and they only seem to have a slightly less wanky name than their contemporaries Twelfth Night and Pendragon because they wisely dropped the Sil- from the start of their name at a very early stage.
Two things distinguished Marillion in the early days. One was their guitarist, Steve Rothery: an unassuming gentleman, but probably the most under-rated guitarist in rock history. The other was their imposing lead singer and lyricist, Fish (Derek Dick to his mum). Their early songs are musically very much the sum of their influences, from Genesis to Camel to Van Der Graaf Generator (of whom, more later), but Rothery's guitar work lifts it above the merely derivative, and Fish's lyrics, rooted in direct experience and made vivid by notes of sordid realism, are richer and more affecting than even his idol Peter Hammill had ever achieved.
Their high point, in my view, was their fourth album, Clutching at Straws. It's a dark and frankly autobiographical study of an alcoholic whose world is increasingly fractured and ambiguous, and who is becoming increasingly alienated from friends, family and society. It's bloody good. It was also the last Marillion album to feature Fish. He went on to a solo career, which I have followed with enthusiasm, while the remainder Marillion went off with a new singer into new musical territory that I was less interested in.
science fiction
As a kid, I loved Doctor Who. Still do. I used to get all the Target novelisations of the stories, and read them over and over again. Eventually a colleague of my dad's - I forget who - gave me a load of proper SF books that I guess he had finished with. It was pretty much a grab-bag of novels, short story collections and even anthologies of essays. Lots of Asimov and Clarke, plus some Sturgeon and various others. Clarke was my favourite: Report on Planet 3, Tales of Ten Worlds, Earthlight, A Fall of Moondust... At about the same time I also got - for Chistmas, I think - a hardback collection of SF novels including The Day of the Triffids, I Robot, and The Demolished Man. All great stuff - I loved the later Robot stories - but Bester just blew my tiny little mind. And, just to coincide with all of this, Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds was a big hit. I got the album - loved it, still do - read the novel with the tie-in cover, and at the same time the H.G. Wells story was being serialised in the back pages of Doctor Who Weekly.
So I became an SF fan. Unavoidable, under the circumstances. Fantasy followed, when I saw the Bakshi cartoon of Lord of the Rings on video, read the Fellowship at my friend Mark's house, then devoured the entire trilogy in a weekend when a distant cousin lent me his dog-eared copy. This continued throughout my teens, with novels, movies and roleplaying games.
I sort of drifted away from SF as a living literary form for a while. I often say that what put me off SF was doing a PhD in astrophysics, and it's only half a joke. So much SF just seemed to be presenting a dilute version of the sense of wonder that I could access in its pure form through science, and the hard, or hard-ish, SF that I had relished in my youth now seemed flat and uninspiring. I retained some enthusiasm for, broadly speaking, New Wave SF - Dick, Ballard, Moorcock - but I would hardly have called myself an SF fan.
I started getting back into it when I read Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal. It was new, fresh and exciting, and reawakened the taste for serious speculation expressed through a vibrant story. I'm enthusiastic about contemporary SF/Fantasy again, with authors like Stross, Kay and Stephenson bringing some of that mind-expanding spirit I first experienced with Asimov and Clarke, even if I am now a more critical reader.
I recently re-read the Foundation trilogy. It really is bollocks until the Mule turns up, isn't it? From then on, it's a pretty good story.
science writing
Well, it's my job. I'm the Science Writer at the National e-Science Centre / e-Science Institute (see above). The job mainly entails finding out about what science is going on using distributed computing, by attending workshops, conferences and what have you, and writing articles about it so as to inform the wider scientific community about what everyone is up to. It's very enjoyable. I left scientific research in part because I was sick of thinking about the same narrow problem every day for years: now I get to experience exciting research in every field from particle physics to performing arts, and then write articles about them that draw on my own education and interests to put this work into a wider intellectual context.
van der graaf generator
The forgotten masters of progressive rock, Van Der Graaf Generator produced some the most exciting and audacious rock music you could ever hear. They also created a fair bit of wank, to be honest, but that's a professional hazard of the genre. The essential Van Der Graaf Generator album is H to He, Who Am The Only One. The title is inspired by stellar nucleosynthesis, but that needn't detain us right now. Musically, the band is at its best in this album, with punchy, well-structured tracks that avoid the floppy self-indulgence of some of their other work. But it is singer and lyricist Peter Hammill who really shines here. He creates images of visceral horror in "The Emperor and his War Room", and flips effortlessly mid-phrase from hard rocking to choral transcendence in "Pioneers Over C". Give me ambition and audacity over conventional perfection any day.
