Relaxing

Continuing the annals of my Madison vacation...

Tuesday was shopping day. The friends I'm staying with live a few blocks from downtown Madison (and also the Wisconsin State capitol building; as well as just a couple of blocks from where I lived when I lived in Madison). Downtown Madison must have one of the highest densities of bookstores in the nation, especially used bookstores. So, as I always do when I visit (the whole one other time I've visited since I left), I went shopping.

Well, I ended up being terribly disappointed. Other than the still-excellent Bookworks and the good-if-somewhat-pricey Alternate Realities, I found that the other bookstores were devoid of stuff on my want list (science fiction, humor and Margerie Allingham mysteries). A couple of the stores have always been a bit lackluster, stocking peculiar low-demand stuff, often in not very good condition. One other store was once an excellent used bookstore, but its selection - especially of SF - has degraded markedly since it was bought by new owners a few years back.

Anyway, between the two stores I mention by name above, I did find several books I was looking for. My big find, though, was a hardcover copy of A. K. Dewdney's novel The Planiverse, about contact through the Internet with a two-dimensional world. I first encountered this concept - similar to yet more thought-out than Edwin Abbott's Flatland - about twenty years ago when my Dad showed me an article in Scientific American about it. Later I somehow acquired a copy of "A Symposium on Two-Dimensional Science and Technology", a small-press pamphlet Dewdney published with a great deal more exploration of the principles of a two-dimensional world. I knew Dewdney had written a novel about it, but I'd never found a copy until now (it turns out it's actually back in print), so I was pretty excited to find this!

Dewdney's home page (see sidebar) has some interesting stuff, although the sheer chutzpah of some of the tidbits in it is rather intriguing. For instance, the brief on his book Yes, We Have No Neutrons citing SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) as "bad science" because its "theory" doesn't contain a falsifiable condition. I'd never really considered SETI to be "science" at all, rather it's an effort to gather data which might yield something interesting. Such endeavors have always been an important component of scientific exploration and advancement. But, whatever.

(I myself am not a fan of SETI because I think it's clear that the odds of finding anything - even if there's something out there - are virtually nil, unless they happen to be beaming something directly at us and are relatively close to us [in our section of the galaxy]. It just takes too much power to beam data across interstellar distances. But I digress.)

So shopping was fun. In fact, it was so much fun I decided to do it again on Wednesday!

I headed out to Frugal Muse, borrowing my friend's car for the afternoon, where I didn't find much, but I did score a used copy of The Great Book of Amber, containing all ten volumes of this entertaining (if not terribly deep) Roger Zelazny series. I enjoyed the first series (five books) very much - I've read them twice (which is a lot for me) - but never finished reading the second series. Now I have the whole set in one volume and may re-read them at some point just for fun.

I also dropped in at Epic, the company I worked at for four-and-a-half years, and said hi to some folks I knew there. Mainly I was glad to see my former boss, who was and is a good guy. He's got three daughters now, all age 2 or younger, and as he put it, "That's a lot of people in one house basically doing whatever they want." Yeesh! A nice little visit.

The other bit of socializing I did was to go to a party thrown by some Madison fans to eat some leftover food from WisCon and entertain some out-of-town guests who were sticking around for a few days. It was a fine party with lots of good stories and pleasant company. Of particular note (at least, since I can provide the links here) were a couple of Australian fans who were visiting. One of them - Eric Lindsay - has two Web sites: One called Avalook at Australia, and the other being Gegenschein, an on-line SF fanzine.

Oh, and Wednesday night I headed downtown to the weekly social gathering of the Madison SF group, which was sparsely attended (especially compared to most years for a post-WisCon week).

So the middle of the week was a nice mix of hanging out with people, and walking around buying things. Not bad for a vacation, eh?

Oh, wait, it was also a period of reading things: I read two Connie Willis novels, Fire Watch and Lincoln's Dreams, neither of which I was particularly impressed with. Indeed, each Willis book I read I enjoy less than the last, so perhaps I should stop here. A bummer, since Bellwether was so good!