Book Club 2025: London 2084 by Bing & Bringsværd

I guess this author duo has a special place in the hearts of all Norwegian nerds of a certain age. Not only did they champion science fiction in Norway in the 70s, but they edited a number of anthologies, got a bunch of classics translated, wrote sci-fi TV series… and also wrote a bunch of science fiction books themselves, and some of theme were geared with lased sharp precision at nerdy kids: The most successful book series was about a kid who flew around in space on a library space ship! These days you’d guess that something like that would be the result of extensive booktok market research, but I guess they’re just built that way.

The problem is… once I got older, I realised that they were (and there’s no polite way to say this) not good writers.

So I haven’t read any of their stuff for at least three decades, but I picked this 2014 book up at a book sale a few years ago, and then didn’t read it. Until now.

I kinda enjoyed it? And also, it sucks.

Let me explain: It’s written in a way that went out of style in the 1950s: We’re following an investigation taking place in 2084, and most of the space is devoted to explaining all the technical wonders of 2084. But written squarely to a contemporary audience. Like, imagine a sci fi short story written in 1945: “He pulled out his aetherium-powered pen, which worked as if there were an extremely tiny gasoline engine embedded (but without the fumes) that melted the lead and allowed the pen to write in a very fluid, manly manner.” That sort of style used to be a thing, but nobody writes that way any more.

I just found it to be an amusing read, because the authors’ enthusiasm for describing the World Of The Future is palpable. And like those oldee tymey sci fi stories, the protagonist has virtually no interior life or any character to speak of. While I was reading this, I was thinking “whew, people are gonna hate this!”, and I just checked Goodreads: Yup — it’s got 2.93, which is extremely low for that site.

The plot is stupid, and the ending is risible, but I enjoyed reading it anyway.

London 2084: en fortelling om fremtidige forbrytelser (2014) by Jon Bing & Tor Åge Bringsværd (2.93 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: De romantiske hundene by Roberto Bolaño

Of all the things I opine on that I’m utterly unqualified to opine on, poetry is the thing that I’m unqualifiediest (that’s a word) to opine on.

But I’ve never let that stop me before, so:

Eh, it didn’t grab me. I have no idea, of course, whether it’s the translation that’s the problem (this was originally Los perros románticos, or The Romantic Dogs in English), or whether the poems are just kinda flat, but it feels oddly lifeless and not very interesting. And that’s certainly not a problem with Bolaño’s novels.

I did like this one, though.

The Romantic Dogs (1993) by Roberto Bolaño (buy used, 3.95 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Line Up For Murder by Marian Babson

Oops! I was hung over today, so I decided to read a mystery.

This is a quite original concept — it’s about a bunch of people in line for days for a huge sale, and the “mystery” bit is about whether the people in the queue have other motives for sleeping on the sidewalk than just getting a good deal.

As usual with Babson, it’s pretty well written on a page by page basis, but she needed, like, more more. You can tell that it was a struggle even to fill the 170 pages of this book, and she starts repeating herself around the two thirds mark.

Still, it’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend a day when your brain’s not working well.

I was actually trying to find a different Babson book — the first of the Trixie Dolan & Evangeline Sinclair series, which I know I have here somewhere. But I just couldn’t find it. So I thought I’d just re-buy it as an ebook, but nope! Not available. I guess neither her publisher(s) not her heirs (I think she’s dead?) are confident that anybody would want to read these old and not exactly celebrated books these days, so even if scanning, OCR-ing and proffreading a book wouldn’t be very expensive, it’s not worth it?

Anyway, The Internet Archive has that book, but as a scanned PDF. You can only “borrow” it, but there’s a plugin to allow you to download things anyway, and:

But… eh. Epaper contrast is already pretty sucky, but here we get almost-black on quite grey. I mean, I could fix that up (threshold everything over #aaa to #fff), but the resolution on this thing still wouldn’t make that particularly pleasant.

And I just couldn’t be bothered, especially since I was just trying to find something to read while feeling sorry for myself today.

Line Up For Murder (1980) by Marian Babson (buy used, 3.55 on Goodreads)

WoRdPrEsS ReWrItEs My PoStS

So the other day, for the first time ever, I actually read one of my blog posts (excerpt seen above). (This also explains all the typoes.) But I saw that “WordPress” up there and I knew that I’d never write something that cringe-worthy. And indeed:

See? In that test, there’s only one capitalised character in the word, and I’m not sure that I’m able to actually write that word here, so let me paste it in like an image: . See? Only the first character in the word is capitalised and not several, like some illiterate pendant would do.

So there’s some code in somewhere that rewrites that into . I.e, if I write (let’s see whether this goes through) “W o r d p r e s s”, there’s some code in WordPress to reformat that into “W o r d P r e s s” which apparently can’t be disabled (or at least it seems that way after going through a few menu items in the admin interface).

I object to this censorship! SO MUCH. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE

I quote Cory Doctorow’s revolutionary essay:

This year, I resolve to minimize my use of incaps when writing about commercial products and companies. An incap changes a word into a logo, and has no place in journalism or commentary — it’s branding activity that colonizes everyday communications. It’s free advertising.

So: “Iphone,” not “iPhone” and “Paypal,” not “PayPal.”

I don’t know whether the Automattic Censorship Committee will allow any of those brands to be displayed how they should be, i.e., without InCaps, but I guess we’ll see.

I Pity The Plants

I’ve got a couple of big sansevierias of different types, but they all have the same problem: About once a year, they send up these huge flower stems of, admittedly, not very impressive off-white flowers.

So what’s the problem? It’s that every night when it gets dark, they send out the richest, sweetest, most perfumed scent imaginable. It’s really like WHOA, to put it 90sishly. It’s worse than stepping into an elevator where a combined Perfume & Aftershave Abomination has taken place.

I find myself reluctant to cut them down, though, because the poor plants have spent so much energy on these things… not only the stem, flowers and the scent, but they literally drip with nectar. Very sticky nectar, too.

But tonight I came into the living room, I was literally stunned into submission, swooned, fell over, and literally choked and died, and I’m now dead.

So… begone, sweet-smelling flowers. I’m not gonna miss you.