I like space opera to a certain degree especially the Honor Harrington novels by David Weber if they are not too overblown. Hear that last part, Weber?! So, I am always on the lookout for more and I came across this series by Hunt. In this first of the line, we have your typical mankind versus alienkind fight to the finish with the usual mix of exploding starships, hand-to-hand, fighting, political machinations along with a deeper religious undercurrent. At times, you wonder which of Humanity’s past conflicts are being drawn upon. Is it the Bushido ethic that helped drive the Japanese conquests of the past? Is it today’s clash of Westernism versus Islamic fundamentalism?

It’s the religious/spiritual element in this novel that makes it different from the typical space opera and I don’t know if I like it or not to be honest. I like my operas to be relatively simple and straightforward. I guess that’s why to some extent I never got into Babylon 5 and the new BSG because there are too many hidden meanings and shades of grey. If I want to work at what I am reading then it’d be something from Leakey on the evolutionary process or the science of past climate changes by Ward.

I may give the second book in this series a shot and see where it goes. As it stands right now, The Dark Wing is something a bit out of the ordinary and that could be good or bad depending on your viewpoint. Uh oh…looks like I may be slipping off of the simple and straightforward.

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Early yesterday morning, I read on the Toronto Star’s website about a massive fire down at Queen & Bathurst and, of course, for almost anyone who cycles in the downtown core the first thought would be if Duke’s was going to be affected? The article said that the fire was at Portland and Queen which, so far as I could figure it with the help of Google Maps, was not where Duke’s was. So, meh.

Then, this morning I find out that Duke’s is indeed gone! Almost a whole city block has been leveled and, along with it, a historic Toronto bike shop! I’ve been shopping at the store ever since I came to Toronto almost two decades ago; they’ve got a good selection, decent prices, very friendly people and sort of iffy repair service but still it’s a good enough store that it ranks up there as a place to go if you’re into bikes.

The only good news is that they do plan on re-opening and with the same people so the only real shock may be how spiffy the new place looks. This whole incident won’t be the same as if you’d lost a good friend but something close to them being injured and out of action for a while. Fingers crossed that the new location will be within walking distance once again.

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I’ve never been a huge Superman fan or any other huge fan of a comic book hero but Superman ranks right up there among my favourites. I was first introduced to the Superman universe when the Superman movie came out in the late ’70s and my grade school teacher took us all to see it. It seems that most of our school trips at that time were to the movie theater, although, I think that Rollercoaster was pushing it a bit too far as something for grade-school children!

So, who doesn’t remember those scenes of the planet Krypton with its sheer, white cliffs of what looked like snow? The seemingly endless depths of those fissures that fractured the planet’s surface? The spare, featureless barren landscape that looked a bit like a Montreal winter gone on too freakishly long? I do and I’ve wondered from time to time as to where everyone lived and, more importantly, where did the get their food from?

Well, the agricultural aspects of Krypton are not plumbed by Anderson’s book but it does give one a bit more insight into what the planet was like before its destruction. How it was governed, who were the major decisionmakers, why did only a few manage to make it off the planet before it blew and so on. I’m sure that a lot of this info is available through the comic books but it’s all new to someone who has never read them.

Anderson’s book is informative, fast-paced and very well put together with characters that are fleshed out to some degree. It’s a great sci-fi adventure story that really made me glad that I had set aside a bit of time to go through it. I’m very curious to see whether or not there will be other books about Krypton because this does give a bit of scope to explore other avenues. If it’s done by Anderson, then, I’m there!

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Ok, just had a quick look at my stats for last year and I have to admit to being a bit disappointed, the total distance was 5917 kms. I didn’t even crack the 6000 km mark that I had set for myself and I am afraid that my speed did not go up in any appreciable way. I know that last year I said that distance wouldn’t really matter so I guess I should shut up about that.

In talking with SL, she keeps on my back about pushing myself harder and I think that that’s what I am going to do. It’s odd, a long while back I may have posted about how good it would be to find someone who is faster than me but needed to do distances and now that I seem to have found that someone it’s as if we’re not that compatible when it comes to riding! hahaha

I’m suspicious as to whether or not a change of bike will make a difference in my overall speed. Even if? I were to get the Trek 520 (as GMS suggests) I think it would be hard to keep up with someone whose bike may soon be some sort of carbon fiber speed-freak of a machine. I need to push hard this coming year, much harder than in 2007. Grrrrr….

So, what’s on for this year? More speed in order to cover more distance.

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