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heptapod.org celebrates seven years of wasting your precious bandwidth, gentle reader.
More realistically, I'll continue rambling to myself in the void.
heptapod.org has served to drive people away from me. heptapod.org has served to creep people out. heptapod.org has also made people understand what's going on in my head and like me as a human rather than a caricature. At this point of my life I don't care if it's self-destructive. Plus if those people didn't like me in the first place then they can go fuck themselves.
I have no surprises, just initial shocks that are swiftly followed by a feeling that nothing hasn't really changed with me or the world.
A rich girl pretends to be a poor orphan, catches the eye of the protagonist and reveals her famous surname and bank account. This only serves to push him away on a 20 year flight from Earth to a distant earthlike planet ripe for colonization in the hopes of realizing his own life and destiny rather than succumbing to the whims of the rich girl and her powerful father.
I was pleasantly surprised by the story since it went in a direction that I wasn't expecting in the first place. The plot revolves around the protagonist's life aboard the colony ship, the first handful of years and a realization that he can never go home again. Mr. Robinson captures the spirit of Heinlein without aping the grand master creating a beast with its own voice and personality. Heck I like it and I sinned hoping there would be a sequel even though that would effectively diminish Variable Star as a tale. I'm of the school that if there's a story to be told then fucking tell the story, don't serialize it like Scalzi or (Nick) Sagan.
Variable Star is a good yarn, a solid three stars out of five read which will dim to two stars over the passage of time. The one flaw is the fact that Variable Star is already dated.
Now I'm not talking about those charming pulp stories from the thirties where spaceships used enormous vacuum tubes as they plied their way between planets and stars. Heck those kinds of stories only serve to spark one's imagination, wondering if things really could've been possible with that dusty old technology moldering in today's junkyards and attics.
This one quote from Variable Star sums up why it's dated:
Instead I used the UA to google around until I had figured out the "Smithers" gag.
Google? Smithers? The use of that proper name as a verb and that character's name only serves to date the book at the turn of the millennium. Mr. Robinson pulls a far more egregious boner near the end of the book during one of his character's definitively Heinlein soliloquies by mentioning 9/11, a possible future history and then drawing a parallel between a pivotal event in the novel with 9/11! Shit's going to happen in the 21st century that will outshine or overshadow that grim day. I sincerely doubt two hundred to three hundred years from now people will still be saying "NEVAR FOREGT" or "LOL JEWS DID WTC LOL".
If you're not a Heinlein fan I must recommend finding a copy of Revolt in 2100 to fully appreciate the references to other Heinlein stories peppered throughout the book. Mr. Robinson did leave me wondering if he tweaked that future history that The Prophet was no longer a backwoods preacher but a Muslim. Of course that may be my own datedness coloring my perceptions.
Wandering around the park were zombies. Hundreds of zombies. Thousands more were ambling and lumbering through the streets. Honestly one never really knows how many fucking people there are in the world until their animated corpses are blocking sidewalks and roads or actively seeking to consume your brains and flesh. Same goes for one never knowing how heavy an adult human being can be until that adult human being is incapacitated, unconscious or dead and it's up to you, gentle reader, to move that dead weight. Shit's easy when people are walking to avoid hitting other people or helping you lift them to their feet.
Just sayin'.
Now we're pushing our way through the crowd of docile zombies, some of which meander out of our way. Other people are actively fighting zombies even though the zombies really aren't doing much of anything. The zombie squads inform us about how only eight percent of a zombie is necessary to turn a living human into a zombie. Find a zombie head? Be very careful or it'll bite or scrape you or bleed into an open sore turning you into the undead. Same goes for the other parts.
Beyond that the dream is uneventful in an interesting place at an interesting time. We bide our time, we avoid contact and eventually get back on the ferry back to New Jersey. Funny that the zombie plague didn't make its way across the Hudson to New Jersey.
