2001-04-22 - 1:19 a.m.

The British Invasion

(Note: Actual thinking does appear in this entry, but first, you have to page through a screen or two of babble about my day.)

I want to give a shout out to Dichroic, whose diary I've begun reading. As a sysadmin, I consider anyone working software QA a hero of the revolution.

My big fun today came from meeting my coworker Guy's new baby, Seraphina, and getting to show off my own spawn. Liralyn seemed to have fun, and cracked me up by doing the polite thing and introducing her Mom to the other kids she met.

"Hi, I'm Liralyn, what's your name?"

"Her name is Hannah."

"Hi, Hannah. This is my Mommy, Julie."

Apparently she does this a lot, and other parents sometimes react oddly. One mother declined to tell her child her first name at all. I hope the kid never ends up lost in a K-mart.

To clarify a couple of points raised about my self-centered theory of sexual preference:

• I consider this to be a changable serial value, not a scale. I assume it refers not to momentary intent but rather general inclination- that is, one need not wish to have sex with me right now, one must just have a general willingness to do so in, say, the next month or so.

• Accordingly, I acknowledge no concept of bisexuality on this scale. As Aristotle said, any given thing cannot be both A and not-A at the same time.

On a note which more closely relates to something interesting, I've been reading loads of British SF recently. I had been compiling a list of interesting books mentioned on Usenet that I couldn't find in the US, and back in February I ordered 'em all from amazon.co.uk.

Today I finished the last Ken MacLeod book from that order. MacLeod can write, make no mistake. So can Iain Banks. Neither one gets much American press, which I find reprehensible. Hell, most of Banks' recent stuff can't even be bought here, and the UK editions all say "not for sale in the USA" on them. It's as if someone in publishing decreed that Americans Are Not Ready.

I can't quite pin down MacLeod's viewpoint yet. Some of his stuff reads like space opera, and some like left-wing propaganda, and some like Kipling. That sort of combination makes one hell of a happy meal.

Banks' goes much further into extremes. He plays more games with his prose style than Steven Brust, and that's going some. As I fleshed out my reading list of his work, it hit me that almost all his books revolve around some sort of love story. I thought this very weird at first, but eventually I concluced that love comes first at both the alpha and omega of human society. At the beginning, we took love where we could in between killing mammoths and hiding from sabertooth tigers. As we got more organized, we developed all these other things to complicate matters and give rise to Jane Austen novels. At the end of progress, though, when everyone has all the wealth they want or need, we might well go back to basics, and feel free to devote unimaginable resources to letting two individuals play out their feelings for one another.

I can handle that.

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