70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

These days when so many parts of our lives are planned and regulated, it's always nice to be surprised. And today's book thrilled me because just when I thought I had read all of Monica Hughes' science fiction books, but it turned out I hadn't read...

Crisis on Conshelf Ten

When Moon-born, fifteen year old Kepler Masterman visits Earth for the first time, he finds heavy gravity impossible to live in. An underwater atmosphere seems to offer the best solution to his problems and friendly relatives welcome him to their experimental community many fathoms deep in the depths of the ocean. But on Conshelf Ten Kepler discovers a sinister situation linked to the mysterious, water-breathing Gillmen, and realises that not only is he in great personal danger but that the survival of the entire Earth is threatened. 

I don't have any complaints about the cover. This is actually her second book, published in 1975, and thankfully it looks very impressive. I mostly want to tell all y'all how wonderful Hughes' books are - my particular favourites are Devil On My Back and the Isis trilogy. She's another author that started writing later in life, and sadly she passed away in 2003. I assumed that she had stopped writing a long time ago, but she actually put out one book (sometimes two) a year. That's productivity to aspire too, not to mention all the reading I have to do now.

The Bard's Tale

When I had my big January cold, I thought, at least, oh well, I can read something, but I couldn't. My ability to focus had gone out the door with breathing through both nostrils. Was I fated to spend my days staring at the ceiling? Fortunately, as fate would have it, I stumbled across an oldie but goodie game on the Google Play that has been ported over to mobile devices. And just like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, I was in for some interactive storytelling as I embarked on...

The Bard's Tale 

The first thing I noticed was how dated the game appeared, from a time when grass was a strange, hyperreal colour and 3D animation was still a novelty. How funny that my home PC back in 2004 was too slow to play the game. Ten years is ten lifetimes in computing. And if you like things super retro, it comes bundled with the original Bard's Tale trilogy.

The Bard's Tale is one big, hilarious send up of the fantasy genre as well as computer role playing games. There's lots to laugh at, from the first quest (kill a rat) to breaking barrels and being besotted with being a "chosen one" which forms the main quest. The Bard, who is never named, is voiced by Cary Elwes, who starred in The Princess Bride. Occasionally The Bard breaks the fourth wall and gets sarcastic with the droll narrator, Tony Jay.

But besides some goofy songs and a compelling story, there's lots of hacking and slashing. Wolves, boars, trees, evil goblins, zombies - oops - all provide a challenge for The Bard and his companions. Yup, such a sad soul The Bard is - he has to conjure up friends like the Mercenary, Electric Spider and the Crone. If there's one thing I can complain about the game is that some levels were pretty dark and hard to see even with the brightness turned all the way up on my 7" tablet. It was distracting.

Here's the best part about The Bard's Tale though - your actions determine the story and the ending. Being the nice person I am, I chose all the "nice" dialog options. On my second go round, I chose the snarky answers. Being snarky had a price though, literally, in some areas, so use with caution!

It's great to see older games can find new life. They're perfect for playing a little bit at a time, and unlike a lot of mobile games, there is so much to them than just collecting coins, launching birds or crushing candy :-D

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

I was getting worried that I was running out of 70s paperbacks - and it turns out that if I do, this column can be renamed 60s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans, because we have lots of those too! While digging through the cache I found another Arthur C. Clarke book. I suppose dreaming of going to the moon is like dreaming of going to Mars for folks today, but back in 1955, Clarke dreamed of...

Earthlight

Like many works published in the 50s and 60s, one could still dream of a fantastic future in the 80s and 90s from the 70s. Today we take the acceleration of technology for granted, wondering why our mobile devices are so slow when 30 years ago teletypes were still chunking away and 20 years ago you had to have a second phone line if you wanted to make calls and use the Internet. Just 10 years ago most cellphones didn't even have a colour display.

I grew up on the tail end of the fantasy that this cover so fondly predicts. Colonies on the moon! Domed compounds! Monorails!! No wonder Futurama wasted little time with Fry visiting the moon in the second episode of the first season (it probably would have been an amusement park by now anyway). There's also something a little weird about this cover. That, uh, moon tree looks a little suggestive. Nothing quite says "We conquered the moon" by imposing a big ol' fertility symbol on it :-D

Tea for Tuesday

I don't know if it's the weather, but I have been so lacking in energy lately. Living in a Northern country, one does get a lack of Vitamin D. But I'm not also getting the quiet time I need to recharge as an introvert, and I broke open one of these babies!

Specifically, the tea pot one. I had bought a puzzle back at the beginning of December featuring balls of yarn. I'm not a big puzzle person, but for some reason, I really enjoyed putting together that first puzzle. Let me remind you that 1000 pieces is a lot of pieces though, especially when they are all black, red, purple, green and blue!. The teapots and teacups should be more straightforward.

I went back to the store during their Boxing Day sale and just couldn't decide which one to buy, so I bought both! By the time spring comes around, I should have both of them done :-)

Tea for Tuesday

So when I went back to school, I took a class on material culture without really knowing what it was about - I just needed to fill three credits somewhere. In a nutshell, it's the relationships between people and objects. There's some objects that are universal...such as cups, and I added yet another one to my collection. I had no willpower when it came to purchasing a Keep Cup from the indie coffee kiosk at the farmers market. I had been wanting one for some time, but the colours were just horrible, mostly grey, peach, blue and green. Nothing bright and vibrant that shouted to the world "This is Jill's cup, hands off!" (see, material culture, right there!).

As it happened, the coffee kiosk had just gotten a new shipment of cups and I went nuts digging through a box that the supplier left. "He said that all these colours sold well in Australia, but Australians have terrible taste, because none of these are selling," the clerk said as she helped me.

I nodded as I mixed and matched the cups and lids. I loved a dark purple and green combo, but realized it looked a little too much like it belonged to kid. Ahem! Navy blue definitely had a more grown up flair. And speaking of kids, the Keep Cup was inspired by the sippy cup the inventor gave to her daughter. You can be forgiven for thinking that it does indeed look like an adult sippy cup.

The best part is the well designed lid and the plug for the sippy hole. Many a reusable mug has left me splashed and disappointed. It's not rocket science - maybe it's just that most cups are not designed and tested by actual coffee lovers. Oh, and if drinking out of a plastic cup leaves you aghast, your drink will not taste like plastic in this cup at all either.

Happy New Year! Have A Cold!

I didn't plan on spending the first seven days of the new year with a cold, but it was pretty bad. I bailed on Mom's birthday party, stared at the ceiling, chugged Emergen C and nipped at Nyquil. But this was a doozy of a cold. The sad thing is, if I had just listened to my Dad, I might have gotten over it sooner. When you come from an immigrant family, it's a constant struggle between old ways and new ways, and when repeated doses of Nyquil left my mouth more arid than the Sahara, I finally gave in. Time to pull out of big guns.

Garlic.

Lots of garlic.

Now, the way a cold works is that one doesn't get better until it passes on to someone else. As I roamed the shopping centre, the virus awakened and I searched for healthy young bodies to sneeze and cough on. People avoided me, especially after my left eye spontaneously teared up and couldn't stay open. The bags under my eyes were brutal, and I looked every bit of a virus vampire as I felt. I came to my senses, paid 63 cents for a bulb and hurried on out.

Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Once home, I found my little used garlic press and crushed a fresh clove on a slice of toast. Here goes nothing! I like garlic, but usually it's cooked and accompanied by other flavours. It's an accent, not the main course. Each bite was intense and took a lot of willpower to choke down.

A few hours later, another slice of garlic toast. My sinuses felt better, but soon I smelled worse. I was already banished to the spare bedroom anyway, so it couldn't hurt to have more garlic. That night, I could literally feel my whole body fight the cold. I was flush from head to toe and needed no covers at all. The strange, warm glowy feeling lasted the next day, and topped up with one final slice of toast. Four cloves and I couldn't take any more. By the end of the second day, I was breathing through both nostrils again. Ah! Talk about fast relief! It sure beat waking up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, thanks to Nyquil.

Huh, it is true then, all this stuff about garlic being a wonder food with anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties. It even, ahem, has a laxative effect, which so many websites fail to mention (but no doubt falls under "and many more benefits"). The moment I realized that I was morphing from a virus vampire to a pungent poltergeist was when I knew I had to stop right there and have a shower instead of more toast. Now I'm back to my normal self...until the next cold!

70s Saturday Sci-Fi Scans

As one year ends and a new one begins, people struggle to define the past within the present and the future. Ten years from now, 2013 will seem like a faraway place. Thirty years from now, the teens will seem weird (heh, I guess teens always will be) but time is actually a continuum, which may surprise children of the 80s that one of their favourite series had roots in the 70s. Maybe it's more appropriate that the first book was called...

The Cave of Time

You are the hero of your own adventure

This is a book you'll love reading. You will read it differently from any other book you have read before, because in this book you will decide how the story comes out. You'll get to choose exactly where you - the hero - will go along the way. Like this:

What happens next in the story? It all depends on the choices you make. How does the story end? Only you can find out! And the best part is you can keep reading and rereading until you've had not one, but many incredibly daring experiences!





It's so quaint that they had to try so hard to explain the concept in 1979. We play Choose Your Own Adventure every time we play a game or surf the Web (especially Wikipedia), but, for legions of kids, this was the closest they would get to hypertext or the burgeoning interactive fiction genre. My brother and I read them as fast as the library could get them, and the original series spawned dozens of titles. We used a deck of cards to mark our places should we need to retrace our steps. And even though the covers and illustrations mostly featured boys, the text was gender neutral enough to appeal to girls. My brother was always a reluctant reader, and since comics were a no-no in our house, these were perfect for him. My favourites ended up being Be An Interplanetary Spy and Which Way books, which had more of a science fiction/weird horror bent.

It was fun to pick up The Cave of Time and remember why the series was so successful - kids often don't have much choice in their lives (or, at least, I didn't) and the books were literally all about you - just about every sentence starts with the word. You are the hero! You are the genius! You are anything you can be in the CYA universe!