Life is so Complicated
Tonight we had our monthly SF book discussion where we talked about Stephen Leigh's Dark Water's Embrace, which you may recall I liked a lot. The other folks generally liked it as well, and we found a lot to talk about, particularly the moral authority (or lack thereof) that the founders and the elders of the colony possessed given some of their outlooks and actions. There was some skepticism about the scientific aspects of the mutations affecting the colony in the novel, but generally we felt that the quality of the writing drew us in and overcame that fuzzy bit of the plot. It was a good discussion.
(Although our discussion of Sheri S. Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall still holds the record for liveliest discussion of any book discussion I've attended so far.)
Well, at least I have some time to ruminate about it all, edit what I write, etc.
Okay, I knew that The Life Story of The Flash was going to basically be a nostalgia trip, with some nice art by Gil Kane. That's why I bought it in paperback rather than in hardcover. But the pricy The Dome: Ground Zero was a routine SF yarn with computer-generated artwork. Sure, the landscape renderings today are a lot nicer than they were ten years ago, but computer-generated human being still look fundamentally lame, even with today's technology. If I'd taken the five seconds to open the book and realize that it was computer art, I'd have passed.
Batman: I,Joker is yet another Batman story set in a dystopian future, this one involving a Batman-based ruling caste (led by "The Bruce") who periodically surgically alters five citizens to look like Batman's key villains and sends them out to fight him to the death. The Joker of the title manages to defeat The Bruce in an effect to change the society. Although I always like Bob Hall's artwork, this was an utterly routine and tiresome story (along the lines of the equally tedious Robin 3000 of a few years ago). I just don't understand what makes putting Batman in a science fictional setting or a futuristic one attractive. It seems to fundamentally contrary to the character. Just about the only recent "Elseworlds" Batman story I've read in the last 20 years that I liked were the two Gotham by Gaslight volumes, which posits a Batman in the late 19th century.
Oh, and there was the expensive Superman: The Dark Side (first of three issues), in which Kal-El's rocket is hijacked to Apokolips, where Superman is raised as the son of the evil Darkseid. I'm pretty much bored with any story that features Jack Kirby's 1970s DC characters, particularly the New Gods and Darkseid. I don't find them very interesting or very compelling, and I just don't understand this mysterious obsession that many DC writers have with them. I think that one Superman/Darkseid story is all that ever needed to be written (and it was done very well on the current Superman cartoon show). Sigh.
The rest of the haul consisted mainly of fun-but-unexceptional superhero comics, like the latest Green Lantern and Iron Man. Jim Starlin's Hardcore Station is okay, but it's really just a pale shadow of the wonders he worked with his Dreadstar series in the 1980s.
Ah, well. Better luck next week, I guess!
There's a woman in town whom I've been interested in for some time, and we even dated briefly a couple of years ago, but she ended it because she didn't feel it was working out. Perfectly reasonable. I carried a torch for her for a while, but earlier this year I pretty much faced the fact that (as I put it at the time) if she hasn't shown any interest in the last year and a half, then she probably isn't going to start now. So, we're still friends, we see each other socially on a semi-regular basis. A pretty decent friendship, I must say.
This week she asked me if I'd accompany her to a wedding in a few weeks, because she wouldn't really know many people there.
Now, I've only been to one wedding in my adult life, and that was of a good friend (hi, Jim!) which I went to with my then-girlfriend (who also knew Jim), and where I knew a number of the other guests already. So I suspect that's a pretty atypical wedding. All of my other friends got married either after we more-or-less fell out of touch, or before we even met. And none of my close relatives have gotten married during the last decade or so.
So I have this view of weddings as a Big Deal, even for people who aren't the bride and groom. I guess I tend to view them as sort of an "upper class" thing, somewhere above where I tend to envision myself in life (and certainly in the manner in which I conduct my social life, which is just about as informal as you can get). So my reaction to the invitation is pretty much, "Uh, should I be getting a clue here?"
I talked this over with Karen, and she thinks there's every likelihood that it's perfectly innocuous. She says that going to a wedding alone can be a real bummer if everyone else there is paired up, and you don't know most of them. Which makes sense.
So I realize that probably my mental gymnastics are a not-entirely-justifiable fabrication of my little neuroses. Still, it's hard not to wonder, even if I do feel kind of stupid while doing so.
However, at the moment I'm leaning towards going. If nothing else, it might help us simply become better friends. Which is never a bad thing.
But sometimes I feel like it would be best if I never got a clue about anything of this variety.
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