Cool books

[drwex]

Just wanted to point to today's blog entry by Neil Gaiman in which he, in his very understated way, recommends one of my all-time favorite books, Wasp by Eric Frank Russell. I think there are about 10 people on the planet who liked this book, one of whom I friended on LJ(*) just because he used the phrase "Dirac Angestun".

It's a cool book about a (human) terrorist inserted onto an alien planet in a one-man effort to disrupt the aliens' war-making capability. The book is both eerily prescient and amusingly dated (in that way so much SF of past decades becomes).

I'm disappointed that Neil let the film option expire because, frankly, I think this film needs to be made. I hold out tenuous hope for the upcoming V for Vendetta movie because the message of that movie is extremely important. Likewise, a Wasp movie would have the potential to be absolutely rocking and unnerving to the current national zeitgeist. I hope someone picks this one up, but I doubt it.

(*) Am I the only one who consistently typos it as "liverjournal"? My fingers just want to put that extra 'r' in there.

Comments

[sunstealer.livejournal.com]

Yar!

I *love* Wasp. In fact I sent it to my father for some occasion or other...and he liked it too. Though I have to say I've never read anything else by Russell.

And Connie Willis seems an odd bird in that list of current writers. She and Gibson don't often appear on the same lists :)

[drwex]

Although she and Gibson write in very different styles, and certainly in different parts of the modern genre, she's one of the first women SF writers to come to mind when I think about who's writing today that I like to read. Since I'm not sure what kind of sf heinleinfan might like, I figured I'd include some breadth.