|
|
|
contents of this diary - contents special topics written about - topics First entry this page: this page: first entry Hugh Cook - his blog: latest entry |
|
galactic dust storm random questions implicit in website hits cooking with baby squid |
|
site contents diary essays poems stories |
|
page. However, when I went to that page myself, I found it not as easy to navigate as it should be, so I spent a bit of time fixing it up ... although it's still a long way from perfect. The Corgi imprint is owned by an outfit called Transworld Publishers (the publisher of Corgi and Bantam books) which published all ten books in my Chronicles of an Age of Darkness in paperback in the British market. (on this page - click to jump down) Colin Smythe published a couple of the hardbacks in association with an outfit called Dufour Editions. Today I've hunted down a website for Dufour Editions:- If you click the "Enter" button on the home page then you get through to a page which contains a clickable "search" button then you can search for "Cook". If the search data can be trusted, then as of today's date, 2003 August 10, Dufour has available (for sale in the U.S. and Canada) hardback editions of The Women and the Warlords, The Walrus and the Warwolf and The Wizards and the Warriors. However, I'm not totally confident about these search results, for two reasons. First, "search" is tagged as being "currently unavailable":- "Looking for a certain title or author? Click Search to find what you need (currently unavailable)" Second, clicking "search" takes you through to a page decorated with an "Under Construction" graphic. Anyway, Dufour Editions can be e-mailed at "info" at "dufoureditions.com". Now, let's return to the subject of the Corgi paperbacks. Some years back, Corgi decided to remainder (i.e. get rid of) the remaining paperbacks. The paperbacks were acquired by Colin Smythe, who arranged for them to be given new ISBNs. When it comes to paperback editions of Hugh Cook's books, then, a Colin Smythe paperback is a rebadged Corgi paperback. (Any Colin Smythe hardback edition of a Hugh Cook book, by contrast, was actually first published by Colin Smythe.) It seems that stocks of some of these Colin Smythe paperbacks are still available in the UK through I've just been to the www.amazon.co.uk site to check it out. There's a "books" button on the left of the screen (on my computer it's about half-way down the screen on the left) ... I clicked on it, got to a "books" page, entered "hugh cook" in the search box and clicked again .... If the page I'm looking at can be trusted, then there are still some hardback copies of The Walrus and the Warwolf available through Amazon in the UK: (Of course I've got no association with www.amazon.co.uk so I'm not in a position to testify to the validity of what I'm seeing on my computer screen.) I did a search for The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers and found the paperback available (apparently) both used and new. The "new" copy is said to have Colin Smythe Ltd as the publisher with the ISBN being given as 0861403975. The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers is the sixth volume of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series. However, it is very much a stand-alone book. It is set on the island of [on this site:-] [background notes on the island of Untunchilamon] and deals chiefly with the adventures of Chegory Guy. Currently, The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers is ranked as follows:- Also available, apparently, is The Wazir and the Witch. This is volume seven of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series. Volume seven, like volume six, is set on the island of Untunchilamon. While the books of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series generally function on a stand-alone basis, volume seven is a direct sequel to volume six. Right now, The Wazir and the Witch is ranked as follows:- (I'm shocked. I had no idea that one of my books was doing so well!) Also available, apparently, is volume 8, The Werewolf and the Wormlord. This is set in a completely different environment with a new set of characters. A synopsis on the Amazon site says "This story features the adventures of Alfric Danborg, a banker by profession but a Yudonic knight by birth. In his travels he is required to face not only ogres, dragons, assassins and She Who Walks By Night but, worst of all, more senior bankers." In the sales order, this book is currently ranked at 193,883. If you've never read a Hugh Cook book, this would be as good a place to start as any. It's a self-contained stand-alone book which can be read without reference to any of the other books in the series. Today I also went to:- It seems a bunch of Hugh Cook books are available in the States, both new and used, including a certain number of copies (new and used) of The Wizards and the Warriors and The Women and the Warlords. As the Dufour Editions outfit seems to have some hardbacks available for sale in the USA and Canada. Anyway ... some of the books are available for purchase, here and there. What's more, the complete text of volumes nine and ten are available on this website to read for free:- Volume Nine (a complete self-contained book) THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY and ... CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS Volume Ten (complete text - about 250,000 words) THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER The last is a somewhat bloodthirsty novel about war and power. A novel for our times, I'd say. Section 60 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 August 11 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) So how dangerous is the galactic dust storm which is perhaps (or, then again, perhaps not) set to put planet Earth in peril? Today I finally stirred some sluggish brain cells into action (the summer heat doesn't exactly encourage the thought processes) and went in search of an answer. But didn't find very much. First stop was on the site This article kicks off by telling me pretty much what I learnt from The Japan Times on Friday:- This doesn't give me a time frame - "is set to" could mean just about anything. Any good disaster needs a clear timeframe, but, at first, this one doesn't seem to have one.The Sun's shifting magnetic field is set to focus a decade-long storm of galactic dust grains towards the inner Solar System, including Earth. A little deeper into the article, however, we get some scientific data:- Now, that "is now entering" seems to suggest that the Great Galactic Dust Storm Disaster (if it is a disaster, which is unclear) is happening right now. But it seems we don't really know.The data come from the galactic dust grains impacts detected by DUST, an experiment on the ESA/NASA mission Ulysses, which was launched in 1990. The measurements, collected by ESA scientist Markus Landgraf and colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institute in Heidelberg, show that three times more galactic dust is now entering the Solar System than during the 1990s. Landgraf hopes to get "concrete data" from the Ulysses mission, saying "We need to observe from now until 2006 in order to have enough data to see evidence of focusing". However, there's one small problem: So the upshot seems to be:-At present, the Ulysses mission is only funded until September 2004. However, an extended mission is currently being considered. (i) We won't know if the end of the world is at hand until 2006; and (ii) We might not now even then because we went and blew all our pocket money on other projects. (Insert sarcastic comment of your choice about cost of cruise missiles, cluster bombs etc. etc.) Having read the article, I was still fuzzy about the concept of "galactic dust" - still unclear as to whether this "galactic" dust is spread clear across the galaxy or whether it's local solar system dust, the leftover debris from planet-building. I found an article on the site This site features an article with the gripping title the deflection of galactic dust particles by solar radiation And here I found that "galactic dust" really is from the galaxy, not from the solar system:- The next interesting thing is a "not much is known" statement. Statements of this kind are not very common in science fiction stories (you can't really write an effective story if the characters spend most of their time saying, "Well, not much is known, so we don't have a clue, really") but the "not much is known" statement is really common in real science.Prof. Eberhard Gruen, the head of the Heidelberg dust group, leads the Ulysses dust measurements. Regarding the measurement of galactic dust he remarks: "Galactic dust particles do not belong to our solar system, they stream into it from the outside. They are not very abundant, every cubic kilometer contains about 10 of them. Fortunately, they move quite fast through the solar system, roughly with 26 kilometer per second. Thanks to the high sensitivity of the Ulysses instrument we detect about two galctic dust particles every week." (This year I've bumped up hard against the "not much is known" problem while trying to find out about depleted uranium ... you can go so far and then you find that the basic science hasn't been done.) Anyway, here's the "not much is known" statement:- At this stage I realized that I probably wasn't going to get much further and that the story (if there is a story) looks like this:-Galactic dust is a indigenous part of the galactic interstellar medium. It provides the substance from which stars and planets are formed. The analysis of galactic dust grains can reveal basic information about the early phases of the planetary formation process. Despite the astronomical observations of galactic dust that are conducted since the 1930ies, not much is known about these enigmatic constituents of the Milky Way. For this reason, the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics proposes a space mission named DUNE (DUst Near Earth), in order to measure the chemical composition of galactic grains directly. As a first step to realize DUNE, the European Space Operation Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, performs a mission analysis. "Possible planetary disaster and extinction of humanity to be revealed in 2006, maybe, if we have the budget." To wrap up, I went to ESOC:- And there under the "LATEST NEWS" heading was a link to:- This has a neat graphic, credited to P.C. Frisch of the University of Chicago, showing how "The Sun and the nearest stars move through filaments of galactic clouds" The article says, in part:- When I looked at the name "P.C. Frisch" my mental image, conditioned by reading too much science fiction of the junkier kind, was of a Germanic gentleman with a beard and a young, beautiful daughter (fiction's required romantic interest.) (I don't think SF like this gets written any more.)In the mid-1990s, during the last solar minimum, the Sun's magnetic field resembled a dipole field with well-defined magnetic poles (North positive, South negative), very much like the Earth. Unlike Earth, however, the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity every 11 years. The reversal always occurs during solar maximum. That's when the magnetic field is highly disordered, allowing more interstellar dust to enter the Solar System. It is interesting to note that in the reversed configuration after the recent solar maximum (North negative, South positive), the interstellar dust is even channelled more efficiently towards the inner Solar System. So we can expect even more interstellar dust from 2005 onwards, once the changes become fully effective. However, when I punched "P.C. Frisch" into a search engine, I came up with a .... one more gap between fiction and reality. Anyhow, this page had a link to the and also a link to the Journal's special section on which offers (for people who have a password entitling them to log in, which I don't) PDF copies of scientific papers with titles like "The galactic environment of the sun" - which I thought would be a pretty good title for a poem. star pictures etc. archive dinosaur extinctions galactic dust Section 60 Entry 0003. Date: August 2003. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Actually, some of these questions are explicit rather than implicit, taking the shape of full-formed questions. Here goes:- • "is colin powell a distance relative of george w bush" - I don't think so. As I understand it, CP's roots are in Jamaica. If CP's ancestors and w's ancestors had met, I think we would have heard about it a million times over by now. • "killer squid korea" - As far as I know, in this part of the world we eat squid, not vice versa. • "uh oh japanese" - one possible answer to this is a short "A!" Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary (fourth edition) glosses "a" as meaning everything from "Oh!" to "Oh dear!" to "By Jove!" (I think English-speaking people stopped saying "By Jove!" a generation or so ago, but there are probably plenty of Japanese dictionaries which haven't cottoned on to this fact yet.) • "meaning of kekkou" - which we could write as "kekkō" - strangely, I didn't recognize this out of context, but in the context that I'm familiar with it means "unnecessary." (link to usage note). However, looking in Kenkyusha's I found a number of words with the same pronunciation: a "kekkou" which means "suspension of service" (for example, suspension of a ferry service); a "kekkou" which means (amongst other things) "framework" or "architecture" and a "kekkou" which is a literary term meaning "decisive action". • "donald rumsfeld not a guerilla type war" - Agreed. Kind of obvious, don't you think? • "bizarre invasion stories" - try the alien invasion flash fiction called UNDER THE ALIEN YOKE or the full-scale "the aliens are amongst us" UFO story called UFO INVASION - THE TRUTH ABOUT ALIEN ABDUCTIONS!!. • "did science and human kind kill the planet" - No. I'm still breathing, which means we're not dead yet, so presumably the planet isn't dead either. Yet. • "japanese cockroach food" - I'm not quite sure what the question is here. Anyway, I asked a Japanese informant if Japanese people eat cockroaches and the (rather surprised) answer that I got was "No!" • "contemporary short story writer website" - Welcome. You've arrived. • "japanese dictionary satan" - Kenkyusha's supplies "akuma" as a word meaning "a devil; a demon; a fiend; Satan; an evil spirit [angel]". • "swords sorcery novel online". • "sex stroy india" - sort of ... well, getting close ... well, no, actually, this is more like a weird things happen in India to the sometimes peculiarly strange people who go there story. • "virtual woman love clothes" - this is news to me, but I see no reason why they shouldn't. • "naked in her sleeping bag" • "whale eating" • "iraqi rape rooms" - I don't have an answer to the question, whatever the question is, but I do have a question of my own. Which is this: given that George Bush was so exercised about the issue of Iraqi rape rooms before the war, why has he been silent (and, as far as can be judged, indifferent) about the epidemic of rape which has followed the collapse of law and order in Iraq which the American invasion has brought about? • "hack north korean websites" - I'd be surprised if North Korea had any websites to hack. They're eating bark over there. Bark and grass. I mean, we're not talking about a high-tech society here. • "topless towers of ilium meaning" - this led the seeker to an essay on Ezra Pound's poem "The Garret" which does not supply the answer to the question, although it does establish where the quote comes from:- Similarly bare of imagery is W. B. Yeats's poem "When Helen Lived", which was written at about the same time, in 1913 (Yeats: 176). However, Yeats does make classical references to Helen of Troy (line 9) and to Troy itself (line 11). Yeats's poem also contains a literary reference to Christopher Marlow's play "Doctor Faustus", in which Faustus has Mephostophilis invoke a vision of Helen and declares, V.i.97-98:(In case there's any doubt about the spelling, let me show it in lower case letters: i - l - i - u - m.)Was this the face that launched a thousand ships "Ilium" is an alternate name for the city otherwise known as "Troy". (Another alternate name for the same city is "Ilion", that is, "i - l - i - o - n".) "Topless" means "having no top," which is just a poetic way of saying "high". Consequently, "the topless towers of Ilium" means "the high towers of Troy". Paris, a prince of Troy, eloped with Helen, the wife of Menelaus, provoking a war in which Troy was destroyed. The variant spelling "i - l - i - o - n" is used on this website in the poem Helen of Troy (contains adult content) as follows:- • " literary meaning the face that launched a thousand ships" - See the above. Helen's "face" (in Marlow's text, quoted above, her literal "face" - her eyes, mouth and nose face) (or, we could reasonably say, her physical attractiveness to Paris) caused the Trojan War, in the course of which many ships (poetically, "a thousand ships") were launched by the Greeks when they set out to make war on the Trojans. • "plural of thesaurus" - I didn't know this, so I looked it up. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edition) the options are "thesauri" or "thesauruses" (take your pick). (While we're at it, I recently had occasion to check the plural of "succubus". Apparently the options are "succubuses," "succubi" and "succubae".) • "how to end an abduction short story fantasy" - How about having everyone get arrested by the cops? Just an idea. • "making a living from poetry" - Opinions may differ, but in my opinion this is not really practical. • "imaginable torture" - well, you could be living in Iraq right now, full summer, electricity out most of the time, rapists and looters on the loose, no job, no money, fuel shortages ... is that imaginable enough? • "cooking with baby squid" - BE CAREFUL! BABY SQUID EXPLODE! What I do (I don't mind cooking stuff that sometimes explodes) is that I buy baby squid in the supermarket here in Japan. They come in packets of half a dozen or so. They're roughly the size of a sausage and they're kind of purplish. First, I hunt around for a little tab of what looks like cellophane. This should be sticking out somewhere round about where the tentacles join the body. I grab on this and pull on it, being careful not to break it. A cellophane-type tab pulls free - I think this is some kind of rudimentary spine. (If you fail to remove this then you eventually find this chewy strip of cellophane-type stuff inside your baby squid when you eat it.) Then, having rendered the baby squid spineless, I put some oil in a frying pan (I personally cook with canola oil), put in the baby squid, then put a lid on the frying pan to prevent hot oil from splattering all over the place. I fry the squid until they look as if they're done (rolling them over now and then with a fish slice to try to make them cook evenly.) I don't know how long this takes, as I don't usually time things when I'm cooking. However, baby squid take a while to heat through, so (at a guess) upwards of five minutes. WARNING: If you overheat these things (and I do tend to have the gas up a bit hight), they have a tendency to explode. I've also had them explode in the microwave. If I'm cooking them in a frypan I'll try to cook them at a moderate heat, and I'll also put a saucepan lid on top of the frypan. If I'm heating them up in the microwave, I'll put some "for use in microwave ovens" wrap over the top of whatever dish I'm heating them up in. (I've never used a microwave to actually cook baby squid, just to heat them up.) Anyway, that's my recipe for baby squid. It works for me. WARNING: whatever you do, DO NOT talk about your "exploding baby squid" while in an airplane, in an airport, anywhere near an airport, or while in any area which might be bugged. These are dangerous times .... • "nuclear war north korea probability" - Gee, good question. George Bush isn't giving North Korea's Kim Jong Il any escape routes, and so I'd say the probability of North Korea using nukes in a war (this year, next year or some time in the next five years or so) has to be a non-zero probability. • "natto beans" - The Japanese food "natto" is made from fermented soy beans. |
|
diary essays poems stories flash fiction |
|
|
MILIEU MAP WORSHIPPERS WITCHLORD free novels |
story list novel list poem list Trojan War Wizard War |