Zombies and vampires

Horror fiction is not exactly my thing, usually. There is so little fantastic fiction published in Swedish that I have actually read some things John Ajvide Lindqvist anyway just because it was there. And now the movie based on his first book, Låt den rätte komma in gets a really good review at SciFi.com. And it's going to come to a movie theatre here in Kingston on December 12. I want to go!

And once again I ask myself why there is any need for a remake in English. Having grown up with subtitled movies and television, I really cannot understand why people could not just see the original. I guess it's just a matter of perspective, and what you are used to.

Sometimes I feel bad for being listed in blogrolls for physics blogs, when I have long periods when I don't write anything about physics. I like to relax with thinking about other things, like science fiction and stuff like that. Anyway, just because John Ajvide Lindqvist also wrote a good zombie novel (yes, it was good, despite the zombies), I'll post a link to Better Zombies Through Physics at Tor.com, where we see yet another example of how the gedankenexperiment by Schrödinger about the cat in the box inspires popular culture. I'm not sure it actually ever teaches anyone anything much about quantum physics, but it's one of the things that make people in general aware that such thought experiments exists. Physics is part of our culture too, sometimes very much so, and the separation of the two cultures is perhaps not always so wide.

(It's Friday night and want to go home, but I promised a student to test some analysis code first. It's taking forever to execute. Good that it's weekend now.)

How the world works

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, quoted in this article about anti-authoritarian ideas in science fiction:

“Young people read fiction to figure out how the world works,” he says, “and science fiction is an extremely effective, quick way of testing your views of how the world works.”

This is exactly what I often try to say.

I think not only young people go to fiction to figure out how the world works. We think and understand things to large extent in the form of stories, and get our role models from stories. Science fiction is very powerful, giving tools in the form of story pieces to reflect and make sense of things. Especially if you deal with lots of changes in the world around you.

Rereading

Neil Gaiman wrote an essay for the program book of the 2002 World Horror Convention, about how to read Gene Wolfe (this I just learned from the introduction of the Wolfe story in the Wastelands anthology). His third point in this essay was: "Reread. It's better the second time."

Sometimes I miss the kind of reading I used to practice as a child and teenager: I would devour tons of books, and find some favourites. The favourites I would then read again and again, always coming back to them. Sometimes thinking about them between readings too.

I don't really do that anymore. Have I lost something? I'm afraid I have. I never make close friends among books anymore, only acquaintances.

I have been thinking about this for a couple of days (especially today, drowsy and unfocussed on anything productive after staying awake half the night to take care of and clean up around my sick child), since the SF signal Mind Meld about books worth reading twice. Which books are there that I would like to read again?

This is not very thought through, just my first inspiration. Here's the list anyway. Some books that made a large impression when I first read them, and that would be fun to take a closer look at again.

• Kim Stanley Robinson: The Mars trilogy. And the Three Californias.


• Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash


• Ted Chiang: Stories of Your Life and Other's


• Dan Simmons: Hyperion (only the first book of the Cantos)


• China Mieville: Perdido Street Station


• John Crowley: Engine Summer

Do you have any books you still reread, or that you would like to read again? (I shouldn't ask questions at the end of a blog post, because I always get disappointed when I get no answers. Anyway. It seemed to belong here.)

New Scientist on science fiction

Apparently there is going to be a special edition of New Scientist coming out on Saturday, about the future of science fiction. I'm going to buy this, read it, and tell you what I think.

I found out via Cheryl Morgan, who suspects "the main result of this will be a whole lot of people who don’t know much about SF (or sci-fi) pontificating learnedly on the subject and earning themselves spots in Dave Langford’s 'as others see us' collection."

We'll see. I'm interested enough to take a look.