urgh, dreams

I was having an ordinary boring dream when the characters kind of stopped, looked at Jack O'Neill, and me, and Jack's new kid, and Jack and me and the kid, and were like hmmmmmm
and Jack was all grins and yeah, that's my baby mother, isn't our kid the cutest?
which, in itself, okay
but why would his friends not know this?
clearly I wasn't around
so that dream segued neatly into one explaining why I wasn't around
which involved explaining all the reasons I suck
to a ten year old
who was sad his mum didn't like him.

So now I feel like I suck epically
and am also sad that I have no babies
even though it is perfectly logical to have no babies.

I think I'm going back to bed and declaring a do over.

Brian Ball, Timepiece. 1968

Well that was a waste of an afternoon.

It looked like it would be about time travel. It appeared to kick off with time travel to Byzantium. But it turns out the setting is a future so far away that everywhere has been explored and understood, so reality got really boring, and the only remaining good in the world is entertainment. It isn't time travel, it's some kind of full immersion massively multiplayer RPG, very sketchily described.

He gets sent in to rescue a girl and does so with a bunch of killing and striding around like he owns the place. Meanwhile back in reality he has three female assistants, appearing in just that one scene, who keep telling him what to do without caring about him very much. Even the secretary who lets him grope her doesn't seem to put her heart into it any more. So sad.

... ugh. This point of view guy made me feel like I was wading through slime for the whole book. But it was short, so I read it anyway, and that was not as it turns out worth it.

The girl he rescues does have a name but she keeps being referred to as the girl. I got slightly confused at some points because he seemed to be introducing a new and unknown character, given that he only referred to her as the girl and described her physically. But no, it's the same girl, he just can't be bothered to remember her name and feels the need to describe her boobs a lot.

Sometimes, when they discover something important, she grabs his hands and makes him grope her boobs.

... at which point I become sure the author has not met a woman.

... actually I'm not sure he's touched a boob. Would you describe them as pulsing? As, like, a primary characteristic? I'm not sure he ever said throbbing but pulsing was definitely mentioned. Which is not a characteristic I would put top of the list. About boobs.

So he gets recruited to set out into space to visit a planet where weird things happen to time. And it's an incoherent mess with paper thing characters that just... I don't know what the author thought he was doing, but he failed. At some points I imagined them as Red Dwarf characters but they fell just short on exaggeration and lacked the required whimsy. They were just bad.

And then when they get to the alien planet of mysterious alien things where danger and excitement lurks around every corner and they have to discover something entirely new to science using only their wits? That's when the girl grabs him and has sex with him. A lot. Even though they only have two days on planet before their brains melt. That's when she decides sex is the important thing.

Because it turns out the entire book, the space exploration, the unique spaceship, the danger and death and all that, has all been set up because of this woman's sex life. Because, as it turns out, she once shagged the point of view character, and he forgot her, so she set this all up so she could bring him to the planet where time stands still and just, like, keep him.

Women, right?

*ugh*

*shudders*

especially since he keeps going on about how she's so young she hasn't finished her education yet and here he is a drunken middle aged man having a crisis to even be noticing her and blah blah ugh blah and yet it's her that's the manipulative creepy one?

And all through it there's this complete lack of acknowledgement that women are in fact people, and that sex is a communication shared with another person. Sexual urges are some kind of base animal thing that takes away reason and intelligent faculties, it's entirely about the man and his reactions to stimuli, and that makes women walking traps that lure men into losing themselves. And it's just super creepy. Especially since everything's fine while it's him desiring her, but when she desires him then it's like alarm bells and warning signs, he can't be having with that. That's when it turns out to be a time trap she's trying to set up. And there's so many times she's talking but the book doesn't tell what she's saying, just that point of view guy isn't listening, until she starts screaming 'hysterically'. He assumes she's making no sense and tunes her out routinely. And that? That is who he wants to have sex with? No, that is what he wants to have sex with. Or not even with, another word.

On the plus side in the end she ends up frozen in time with the other man, who seems happy to see her. On the minus side she ends up frozen in time with a man, because that's her whole goal in life.

And I felt like reading this was walking through slime.

So, this book is going out. It's right on the borderline of binning it.

It's like it doesn't know how to be humans and that makes the whole thing not make sense.

Zero stars, waste of paper, can't believe it's apparently the start of a series.

All the Colours of Darkness, Lloyd Biggle

I read this last night and it was quite a nice story.

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I liked the action, I liked the characters well enough, it's skinny but does interesting things in the page count, and it follows through on its science fiction bits in an interesting and methodical way. Plus it makes the other Biggle book I've got look better by emphasising different parts.

So I'll be keeping these two.

Clothes and Labyrinth

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So today (after I gave up and went back to have a nap and reboot) I dreamt I was Sara's offspring and she gave me her waistcoat, the one that had been all around the Labyrinth, and I wore it and wore it until one day it wouldn't button up any more because too much boobs.
A meltdown Sara was not quite equipped to deal with, cause she kept offering to go out and get me dresses that fit.
So Sara's husband, as played by Brad Pitt because why not, waved her off and was all, don't worry, I got this. And she didn't see what he did, but dream me came back in all buttoned down and happy again, so that worked out.

But later when things got fighty there was a very tense moment of knives in the chest, but then it was Frodo with the mithril shirt, no worries because chainmail underneath.

Because the guy who had been through his own Labyrinth and come back? He'd realised that under some decent chainmail, everyone fits their coats. A little weighing down, a whole lot of protection, and acceptance that some people are the prince and the princess, and nobody has power to tell them elsewise.



I liked that dream.