20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

I'm finding it a little hard to post some things on the blog since I'm now actively trying to get things published. I can't publish anything here that I want to see in print elsewhere, basically. So today is a good example; I've written a short sci-fi piece in the Psy-Clones world, but it's standalone and could totally see publication somewhere. So I can't put it here.

Instead, I'd like to talk briefly about what I'm reading at the moment. My wife and I are reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne as a kind of 'book at bedtime' thing. It's fairly long, so it's slow going, but enjoyable. There are some hilarious sections though; it's something I recognise about Verne's writing that he obviously had things he particularly enjoyed, or knew a lot about. The parts of the book where he can talk about those in great detail are terminology-heavy and slightly detract from what's actually going on. Three pages about the polyps in Captain Nemo's display case is plenty. Of course, nothing so far has beaten the description of weapons on board the ship, including a 'duck gun with exploding balls'. We're so mature.

After that, we really want to read Sabriel by Garth Nix (apparently soon to get a long-overdue Kindle edition). I read it a few years ago and really enjoyed it. I love the idea of old tech in the far future, or our tech viewed through post-apocalyptic eyes.

I've been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov's Robot short stories, mainly in Robot Visions andRobot Dreams. Some of the stories are simply brilliant, none of them entirely dated. Of course, some of the descriptive elements are dated, but the stories themselves are solid gold. This includes my all-time favourite Asimov short story, 'The Final Question' which is about entropy. I honestly can't say much because I'd ruin the ending, but I think that this, and stories like this, have a lot to do with my own writing.