I’m pretty happy with this image, another cut from a ceramic puzzle I once made. The original 30 centimeter tile broke across during storage, a risk associated with green-ware. IE not yet kilned. I took the pieces home over the Christmas holidays to decide what I was going to do with it.
Ended up breaking them into 13 pieces to try a different experiment on each piece. In this photo are four of the pieces representing a creek. As well as incising them, and painting them with ceramic slips, I searched one of the local bottle dumps and found fragments of old blue and old white glass to crush. Kilning the glassy fragments made the foamy creek water featured on these pieces. Below them the pieces that were inscribed with creek bank vegetation and fungi.
The so-called Australian Meat Pie … a traditional savory delicacy if you can eat gluten and beef … that nowadays comes in many different flavors, of meat as well as sweets. traditionally eaten out of the hand, not from a plate with a knife and fork. Although pubs do plate them and serve them with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. Not in the case of Jay Jason though, he’ll bag them.
Next up was Chasm City by Alistair Reynolds, published in 2001. “A hardboiled pursuit/revenge thriller set in the RS universe,” from the author’s website. RS = Revelation Space, which I don’t know anything about other than what I’ve just read. Thriller? Nah.
An eight-day read, worked at diligently. Dense and detail rich. According to my research after reading it, this is Reynolds’ second published novel. And also second in reading order, it’s a ‘stand-alone’ as the Reddit experts tell it, but which surprised me as there seemed quite a bit of bloat. Stuff, that for the sake of the pace, readers could’ve done without. Stuff that I wanted to skim, but ended up plodding through because of not knowing what was essential to the plot. There goes my theory that editors don’t look as closely at authors with a lot of books already published.
At times I thought I was reading about Mars. I think it was a case of stories bleeding into one another due to proximity. In this case, me watching The Expanse Series by James S A Corey on television. I think probably due to the sheer size of the chasm. Very Martian. Though in this case, it’s a planet called Yellowstone and a large part of the chasm is domed over.
Life in the chasm is very interesting, regional. As can be expected the upper classes live in the Canopy, the slums are in the Compost. Travel is by semi sentient vehicles that claw their way up and down and along hanging vegetation and cables. The slum dwellers are all about making a living. The rich play at turkey shoots, where they free a prisoner and force them to run for their lives.
The two main characters, with at first separate stories, eventually seem to meld into one another. The POV character keeps changing identities, and is as slippery as an eel to keep hold of. I found that quite disconcerting as the story is complex and I found it easy to get lost in. I did a lot of re-reading.
Why didn’t this turn into a DNF read? (Did Not Finish for those of us at war with acronyms). It could’ve, to be honest. But Reynolds also wrote the Revenger trilogy… Revenger, Shadow Captain, and Bone Silence. Three of my favorite modern science fiction reads.
Fantastic worldbuilding, great characters, piracy and treasure hunting, a gripping plot, a steampunk flavor. Rave, rave, rave.
Reading Chasm City I kept wanting to give Reynolds more time to come good, to tell the story with as much verve and vitality he’d shown in Revenger. I think now, knowing the Chasm City was only his second novel, that he was still learning.
These look a bit like the kind of roots growing from Tardi’s heels and elbows … minus the washing pegs marking out root regions. This photo from IAP – Institute for Applied Plant Biology
Photo by Emily Miranda, featuring Cairns wetlands (North Queensland, Australia), not the kind of mangroves I imagined for this chapter … here, in the photo, the trees are taller. Down in Northern New South Wales, the mangroves are about half the size. And here, there will be crocodiles.
“The basic technique of punting is to shove the boat along with a pole by pushing directly on the bed of the river or lake. In the 1870s, when punting for pleasure first became popular, the normal approach was for the passengers to sit at the stern on cushions placed against the till, and for the punter to have the run of the rest of the boat. The punter started at the bow, planted the pole, and then walked towards the stern, shoving the punt forwards. This is known as “running” the punt. It was the normal technique used to move heavy fishing punts. As pleasure punts became lighter, it became more usual for the punter to stand still – normally towards the stern – while shoving. This is called “pricking” the punt. Pricking has the advantages that the punter is less likely to walk off the end of the punt inadvertently, and that more of the punt can be used to carry passengers.[6from Wikipedia.
The bamboo grove I was thinking of when I wrote this chapter, looks just like this … though I did shift it a bit. There’s that bit of land by the creek near Azalea Bridge, across the water from Mullum High School. A lovely sunny spot in the afternoon. …
Rita de Heer 