(no subject)

( Picture of new Ender's Game front cover )

I was buying Ender's game for someone (sorry! on it's way, I wanted to check the translator for Name of the Rose and Three Musketeers, as I loved my translation, but don't know if another might be different[1].)

But I couldn't bring myself to buy this edition, though it was slightly cheaper.

The dragon is good. In fact, a dragon is a good metaphor for Ender (and the Buggers) -- beautiful in its own way, powerful, but incomprehensible, lean, intelligent, drawing people to it but somehow apart.

But the slogan! "At battle school FIGHTING IS COMPULSORY". What on earth... Who is buying this? It sounds like it's aimed at teenage boys who want Jack Ryan with ray guns. There's some appeal there, but I don't recommend Ender's Game to people who just like adventure with lots of gratuitous deaths. Any death in the novel is mourned over.

I recommend Ender's game to precocious intelligent people who may have been left out at school and with an unfulfilled predisposition to empathise with people.

OK, anyone fulfilling both camps is going to like it, the mock-battles are entertaining, and anyone who likes larger than life embittered heroes probably will like ender. But that's not who I'd aim it at.

Also, it's a little redundant, don't you think? What the hell do you THINK happens at battle school? Any sentence with "battle school" in would fulfill much the same function. All the real fighting is not really on the curriculum. Couldn't they find a more expressive slogan?

[1] Eco had a lot to say about how to translate Three Musketeers, that a lot of charm was in the wolliness of the writing, and automatically translating that away would leave a blander book.

Do you have any favourite editions?

The previous post stands not-withstanding my tendency to be attached to the first cover I see a book in. This applies most to classics which I learned to love in old penguin monocolour covers off my parents, and I expect to see no differently.

But others as well. Watership down is always associated with my parents' particular copy, where the seriousness of the brown rabbit surrounded by flowery grass is underscored by the wornness of the cover. Anything cute doesn't cut it for me.

You can generally go to something abstract -- preferably dark and snazzy and serious -- from a picture, but trying to put a picture of characters I've only ever pictures invariably falls flat for me.

I don't blame publishers for this -- I already love your book, please do attract new readers! I'm just explaining how I feel. For Ender's Game, maybe I do blame.

(no subject)

Ptc reminded us of the pirate loot-dividing puzzle.

(If you haven't heard it, five perfectly rational pirates want to divide some loot. The method is that the most senior pirate proposes a division, and the others vote on it. If a non-strict majority accept it, it stands, else he's thrown overboard and the others repeat the process. The pirates are assumed to care about, in order: surviving, gold, killing other pirates, and nothing else.

Read wikipedia for a filler description, and spoiler for the normal puzzle. If you haven't heard it, it's quite cute, so you probably want to read that rather than reading on here.)

Ian Stewart takes the calculation further, up past 200 pirates when the gold starts to run out, and finds amusing results: http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/bz/pirates_gold.pdf

But it occurred to me the standard solution possibly has another loophole.

( Spoilers )

(no subject)

My directories and files often have names that are meaningful to me, but possibly not so to anyone else, because they've grown holistically from slightly different origins, the way you can remember where in your house something lives even when no-one else can.

Stories on the (varied) theme of "How Fire Became" and "How the Kitten Became" reside together in the directory "HowTheBecame." That works, but isn't quite a sufficient name to refer to the series by to anyone else.

(The stories are different, but have very similar premises, and in some ways have similar feelings, so I group them together. They're inspired in different ways by Kipling's "How the Foo got its Bar" stories and Ted Hughes' "How the X became". They're fairy-tale like stories about God's early creation.)

What should they be called?

* "How The Something Became" stories?
* "How Fire Became" series?
* "Kiplingesque" stories?
* "Eden" stories?
* "Origin" stories?