Thiền Trong Nghệ Thuật Bắn Cung tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Dennis Luijer visuallyyours — I think I experienced every emotion I've ever felt reading this book. It was wonderful! Thomas Hardy has this incredible way of building his characters up and then chopping them off at the knees.

Edward Diaz webtackle — What a lovely little chapbook.

Zync Designs zyncdesigns — I always hate to write about these venerable SF classics, because very frequently I end up being disappointed by them. I know that I can't hold genre fiction from the 1950's up to the same standards as current-day genre fiction, but... Well, hold on. Actually, I can and I am. Maybe I just feel guilty about pointing out the various flaws, especially because back in the day, this was cutting-edge stuff. Sure, it's filled with cardboard characters (almost all male of course) that either talk about science, fight off alien menaces, or do both simultaneously. Sure, some of the "cutting edge" science is now verging on the ridiculous (early in the novel, one of the scientists dictates a report and then runs it over to the steganography department to have it transcribed). Some of it is a bit unfortunate (naming the most commonly used weapons "vibrators" was just plain distracting). But there are also a lot of ideas here that were really innovative and exciting at the time. In the end, I try to read these novels with an open mind, trying to muster admiration for them by keeping their place in the canon in mind... while trying to ignore the distractions. So. This is an episodic novel --- it really feels like 4 separate novella's sharing the same characters. The 4 stories are incredibly similar (even down to the length --- about 50 pages each). The Space Beagle is basically a giant inter-galactic spaceship filled with a bunch of scientists from nearly every known discipline (and one new one --- more about this later). They are on a voyage heading out of our galaxy and on the way to the galaxy next door. Along the way, they encounter 4 different alien life forms (one per story) who all pose a threat to the expedition. Some of these aliens are pretty nifty (the telepathic bird-people were very cool). Others are more boring (the lay-their-eggs-inside-human-tummies variety). Invariably, the aliens are defeated by Elliot Grosvenor, the ship's only representative of Nexialism, a relatively new science branch that is initially described in very vague terms but in the end turns out to be something like a simultaneous insight in every other science branch, achieved by hypnotic machine-learning brain-programming (with tapes --- in the vein of CJ Cherryh's Union folks but less evil). Grosvenor is initially ridiculed, shunned and/or ignored, but time and again turns out to be the ship's savior. My favorite aspect of the novel was the sometimes ethically questionable methods Grosvenor uses to push through his will. It adds a nice greyness to the black-and-white quality of the other characters (good scientist versus evil scientist politics). Grosvenor does good things, but he sometimes accomplishes them by hypnotizing entire sections of the ship to make them do his bidding or by killing the last or only representative of an alien race. In this sense, the novel reminded me of George RR Martin's "Tuf Voyaging" --- about another loner who is posed with moral dilemmas. (I just realize "Tuf Voyaging" is also an episodic novel. Hm.) However, none of the characters in this novel come anywhere close to the depth and charm Martin used to draw Haviland Tuf, one of my favorite SF characters of all time. In the end, I would only recommend "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" to people who have an interest in the history of the genre and are willing to overlook some of the flaws common in older genre fiction.