The Contact Imminent/Endgame omnibus is being offered at SFBC, with a ship date of December 19. They've used the Endgame cover, but changed the font. I must say, it's a darned spiffy matched set.

I was going to work on GIDEON this evening. What did I do instead? Cataloged books in LibraryThing. I passed 200, so I went ahead and bought a lifetime mebership.

200 books. About one bookcase. Four more to go.

I pulled books off the shelves to enter them, and now I don't know how I'm going to reshelve them. I think I wound up with more books than I started with, because I honestly don't know how the hell I managed to get them in the bookcase I took them out of.

One of the books on the ever-growing TBR stack is Dan Simmons' The Terror. The dedication reads: "This book is dedicated, with love and many thanks for the indelible Arctic memories, to Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, Dewey Martin, William Self, George Fenneman, Dmitri Tiomkin, Charles Lederer, Christian Nyby, Howard Hawkes, and James Arness."

It didn't hit me until I saw Arness' name. Simmons dedicated his book to the cast and production team of the movie The Thing. Given the book's storyline, it makes sense.

Cool.

Finished BLINDSIGHT last night. Not a happy book. Much by way of the Shiny, and it worked for me. At times, the post-humans seemed as alien as the aliens, which were the best aliens I had ever read. At times, the Shiny got in the way of the plot. But the whole package was compelling enough to keep me reading, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for the vast majority of books I've read in the last year.

"Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off."

Back to reading BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts--it's lunch break, ok?--and enjoying the hell out of it. Tracking the POV changes, or the changes that turn out not to be, is proving a bit of a challenge, but I still like it a lot and frankly, I usually don't go in for harder SF.

Funny how you can come to care for characters. Putting someone in a vulnerable position doesn't always do it--I've read crying and wailing and death in the wings and set the book aside after a few chapters. Niceness is not, Not, NOT a prerequisite. Don't need to want to have a beer with them. Need to want to *read* about them. Two completely different things.

Maybe it's the internal tension, and the hint of frustration. Resignation. Anger. It's inexplicable as any other sort of attraction, when you come right down to it, and why shouldn't it be.

Must go read now...