williamjm

At the start of the season Mick did seem to be outpace by Magnussen but it's been much more competitive in recent races. It was a good race, with Verstappen leading early on I wondered if he might just stay out front as he did in the sprint race but both Le Clerc and Sainz seemed able to overtake him without too much difficulty, he must have gotten a bit tired of the sight of the Ferraris passing him. It's a pity that Sainz's engine blew up just as he was about to pass Verstappen again, just when his season felt like it was really starting to come together.

Youtube was recommending me this footage of Spa in 1966 (according to the description filmed for the Grand Prix film). It is like a different world in terms of safety with telegraph poles at the side of the road and very occasionally a straw bale and spectators wandering onto the track during the race.

That is a horrible looking accident. In the commentary I think it was Mark Webber who made the point that the impact wasn't really that big by F1 standards so the important thing was the car remaining intact and the driver's head being protected. Webber is something of an expert when it comes to flipping racing cars. And the Halo was brought in partly because of Bianchi's accident.

The last thread is over 20 pages so time for a new one. That was a bit of a crazy race. I don't think I've seen anything like Zhou's accident on the first start with the car jumping over the barrier, it must have been an alarming moment for the spectators in the stand beyond. It's a relief that nobody was hurt, Zhou might be very grateful for the halo and even though it probably wasn't as high speed a crash as (for example) Verstappen last year it's always a bit worrying when the impacts are at unexpected angles. The second attempt at the race was also very eventful. Sainz had a weird day, showing good pace at times but making what could have been a crucial mistake to let Max past and then having the humiliation of having to let his team-mate through but he still came out on top. Definitely a bit of luck there, with Verstappen's two passes being negated by first the red flag then his technical issues and Ferrari's questionable strategy leaving Le Clerc on the slower tyres after the safety car. The battle for the podium positions in the last few laps was very entertaining with all the switches of position. I think this is also the first time this year Mercedes have really looked like challenging for a victory, although ultimately Hamilton couldn't quite live with the pace of Perez's Red Bull.

He hasn't done anything else in the Guns of the Dawn world so far. If you want fantasy then he's done two series, the Shadows of the Apt series and the Echoes of the Fall trilogy. There's a lot I like about the Apt books although compared to Guns of the Dawn they have some pacing issues at times. I also liked the Echoes of the Fall books (starting with The Tiger and the Wolf), they were written later and I think Tchaikovsky had learned a lot from writing his debut series.

Maybe Kote was just being an unreliable narrator to Chronicler and he's decided to tell him what really happened?

I see there's now a release date for a third Children of... book with Children of Memory out in November https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60850767-children-of-memory

Guns of the Dawn does feel a bit different to his other books, one of Tchaikovsky's trademarks is the inventiveness of his world-building but it's not really the focus of this one. I think Emily is one of my favourite characters out of his books, she does go on quite a journey through the story in terms of character development.

He is absurdly prolific, I've read a lot of his books but struggle to keep up with him - I haven't read Elder Race yet, for example. Out of them I'd particularly recommend Children of Time, Guns of the Dawn and Dogs of War. The first thing I read by him was his 10-volume Shadows of the Apt series, I thought the imagination of the world-building was fascinating throughout the series. It's not got the consistency of his later books, I think he was still learning his trade in the earliest books and it has some pacing issues at times and sometimes the plot got a bit repetitive but I've got many fond memories of it.

I felt that he was more convincing as a 10-foot tall blue alien than he was portraying a human being.

Obviously Darkness and Light is entirely consistent with the rest of the books and it's entirely believable that Sturm never thought to mention any of this to the others.

The blurb does sound a bit like Dragonlance fan-fiction, although I could probably say the same about many of the non-Weis and Hickman Dragonlance books.

I think I commented in the "First Quarter Reading" thread that initially some of the set-up did remind me of Robert Jackson Bennet's Foundryside, although the plots do end up going in different directions.

A Ukrainian band with a ferocious rewrite of The Clash.

There are probably going to be some very conflicted Irish rugby fans out there having to hope for an England victory to secure the title for Ireland.

Hugo voting closes tomorrow so I've filled out the bits of the ballot where I have something to nominate. For Best Novel I went for: Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik The Fall of Babel by Josiah Bancroft The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers For Best Novella: What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells Knot of Shadows by Lois McMaster Bujold For Best Series: The Age of Madness by Joe Abercrombie The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

I was thinking the same that it did feel like Scotland were playing better despite how the scoreline ended up. Darge did look like a good replacement for Watson. I think Wales should probably be reflecting that was a game they could have won. Their lineout was a shambles at times, particularly gifting England their first try.

It was one of those odd games where the winning team was the one which hardly had the ball for most of the game, not that any Scots will care about such stats. As well as the defensive mistakes England rarely looked turning their dominance in possession into tries. Judging from today's games it looks like Ireland must be the big favourite from the Home Nations. We probably won't really be able to judge France properly until next weekend since they likely won't have to exert themselves too much to defeat Italy tomorrow.

I think perhaps not in the short term but maybe in the long term? I think without the expansion to other star systems there was a serious risk of humanity wiping itself out given how much antagonism there was between the different factions and how fragile the planets were to attacks such as the one we saw in the series. That risk is significantly reduced with multiple apparently viable colonies which at least initially don't have any contact with each other.

They've now been confirmed as the winner by 2006 to 807 despite what seems to have been a late attempt to change the counting procedure to disqualify 3/4 of the Chinese votes for not having a postal address on the ballot paper.

Since it's only a day and a bit until the deadline I voted for the Hugos today. I went for: Best Novel: Piranesi, Harrow the Ninth, Black Sun, Network Effect, The City We Became (didn't get round to catching up with the Lady Astronaut series). I think Piranesi was definitely my favourite, but the others were also good. Best Novella: Empress of Salt and Fortune, Ring Shout, Come Tumbling Down, Upright Women Wanted, Riot Baby, Finna I thought the first two were particularly good. Best Novelette: Inaccessibility of Heaven, Monster, Two Truths and a Lie, Burn, No Award, The Pill, Helicopter Story I think this the weakest of the fiction categories although the first three were good. There were a couple I thought were awful. Best Short Story: Open House on Haunted Hill, Metal Like Blood in the Dark, A Guide for Working Breeds, Little Free Library, Mermaid Astronaut, Badass Moms of the Zombie Apocalypse This on the other hand was much stronger and more difficult to rank the different stories against each other. Series: Daevabad, Murderbot Diaries, Lady Astronaut Best Drama (Long form): Palm Springs, Tenet, Old Guard, Birds of Prey Not the strongest year for films for obvious reasons. Best Drama (short form): Good Place, Doctor Who, 2 * Mandalorian I really need to catch up with The Expanse on TV

I don't think I'll rank it #1 myself but I definitely wouldn't be upset if it won since I do admire its ambition and willingness to be different.

Looking on Goodreads he's got about 3000 ratings for his books, which is not a huge number but that would only be a fraction of the total readers so I think significantly more than 3000 copies.

That was one thing I was thinking that as long as the ratings for the first season aren't a flop it will probably go on for as long as JMS wants to. At some point in the earlier development of B5 wasn't there some sort of plan to do 5 season of B5 and then a sequel show about Babylon 4 being used in the war against the Shadows? Alternatively, he could remake Crusade as a sequel and make it longer-lived and a bit less rubbish.