Lamp post ? Actually ... looking a bit more (and cheating with a peek through the googles) and it's the Cloud City of Bespin with the red thing being a cloud car.
The Empire Strikes Back is one of those great films, from the set pieces during the Hoth segment of the movie and the trip through Cloud City that was massively enhanced in the special editions. There's a Lego set too ... which I have no intention of getting (it's £200+ and a bit meh)
What are the books for today ?
On the left is one of Isaac Asimov's final novels, Nemesis. The first new colony on an alien world has sent a distress signal and a rescue mission is dispatched using a spaceship with a revolutionary new hyperdrive. At least, that's what I can remember from reading this book a few decades ago. It's been on the list to read again, need to get around to making a dent in that list.
In the middle is The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey. This is from her earlier days, before the Dragonriders of Pern books really took off. It was written as a standalone book, although the Brainship millieu has expanded since then. There have even been novels with guest authors like S.M.Stirling who wrote The City Who Fought, another shell person novel.
This was a pretty interesting book, posing all sorts of ethical questions in its own gentle way. At the core are the shell people. If I remember right, they had genetic manipulation but for some issues, the genetic damage was too great and would have resulted in a quick death for the little person. However, the central theme of these books is that they are permanently inserted into a life support system that looks after their basic needs. Keeps them sustained, gives them an interface to the outside world, provides them mobility. I vaguely remember a scene where the shell children are racing around in their life support shell buggies.
Happy children, albeit in a metal shell. They are also taught and conditioned to be able to mentally accept connections with computers and other complex electronics and the central character in this book, Helva, is selected to be the brain at the centre of a spaceship.
The crews are a symbiotic relationship of a Brain and a Brawn, with the Brawn being the pilot that the outside world sees while the Brain is hidden behind a protective shell, interfaced with the spaceship. The Brain is effectively the spaceship.
But they're not just computers, Helva develops a taste for music which she uses to refine a voice and become .... the Ship Who Sang. The book itself is a combination of several shorter stories tracking Helva and her interactions with the people who travel on her ship and her brawns.
A pretty good book. Recommended.
Last one for today is Voyagers by Ben Bova. He's an author that I read a lot of in my teenage years. He doesn't have quite the same hold on my attention now though. Other authors write far stronger stories.
Anyway ... in this one, the Solar System has a visitor. An object entering our sphere of attention and ... slowing. The object comes within close enough range of Earth but ... wouldn't be sticking around. Can they reach it and examine its secrets before it is lost to the void forever ?
There are 2 more books in the series ...
That's it for today ! I've been struggling for the past couple of days with a sore fuzzy head but should be good for a bit of travel tomorrow. Hopefully. There are going to be 3 people from the Lovely Gaming People on the right (Enter Elysium, Maggie Krohn and FuzzyFreaks) plus a few more who I've enjoyed watching.
Should be an excellent trip.
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