Welcome

Welcome to our family website, a look into the lives of the Walker-Smith family, well thats the idea

To find out more about us read the whoweare page, to find out more about this site have a look at the colophon... hmm which doesn't yet exist

This site as it stands at present looks excellent on Mac, with Sarari, Netscape7.1, and Mozilla Firebird0.7, and now IE. If it looks bad in your browser, either buy a Mac or upgrade to the latest browsers!

This is a work in progress, I hope to turn the whole site over to this look and feel over the next few days, so this site may not be working 100%, esp in those pesky window browsers.

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Reviewed

• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• Hybrids, Robert J Sawyer
• Havana, Stephen Hunter
• The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
• Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Cloud of Sparrows, Takashi Matsuoka
• The Teeth of the Tiger, Tom Clancy
• The Last Samurai
• Time's Eye, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
• Ilium, Dan Simmons
• Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• Film: Just Married
• book: Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson
• book: Bios, Robert Charles Wilson
• book: Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
• book: A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch
• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• book: Red Thunder, by John Varley
• Film: Kill Bill
• book: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
• book: Colony, by Rob Grant
• book: Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson
• Film: 28 days later
• Film: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
• book: Pale Horse Coming, Stephen Hunter
• Films: three good ones
• book: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• book: Humans, Robert J Sawyer
• book: The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
• Film: Terminator 3
• book: Blue Horizon, by Wilber Smith
• book: Evolution, by Stephen Baxter
• book: The Physics of Consciousness
• Matrix Reloaded: Theory

Words

• minutia
• Perfidy
• Necromancer
• ephemeral
• bete noire
• etymology
• heliopause
• agitprop
• entr'acte
• allegory
• ameliorate

Recent Entries

• Abroad with BT
• We're Londoners
• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• Indy at six… months
• Its a bit unnerving...
• Hybrids, Robert J Sawyer
• Havana, Stephen Hunter
• The Jimny, bought July 1999 – sold June 2004
• Hmm Apple Juice
• Options
• The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Uncle Toms Fotos
• My many faces
• Mass Destruction
• Being left by ...
• minutia
• Daddy, where have you been all this time?
• Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
• Certified Geek
• Green Delight

Archives

• September 2004 (1)
• August 2004 (1)
• July 2004 (2)
• June 2004 (7)
• May 2004 (7)
• April 2004 (5)
• March 2004 (9)
• February 2004 (17)
• January 2004 (24)
• December 2003 (21)
• November 2003 (15)
• October 2003 (20)
• September 2003 (25)
• August 2003 (15)
• July 2003 (32)
• June 2003 (51)
• May 2003 (12)

book: Evolution, by Stephen Baxter

I just finished reading Evolution, and book by Stephen Baxter, ISBN 0-345-45782-X. What great book this was, set me thinking like so many of the older sf books that I have read. The story tells the tale from the first primates to the very last. Each chapter introduces a new story in an epoch of primate history, of course with a bent towards Humans. This though can make it a little difficult to read, like reading twenty or so short stories but Baxter really mixes them well, he even has names from the first chapter used in the last and final chapter. This more or less what happens throughout the book, you get a feeling for the story this way. Allows you to see the time arrow of the book, not just short stories, a greater story is being told.

Its is just science fiction and not science fact, but as all sf books it has a healthy dose of science fact. I loved this book. The ending to book is surprising he finishes the history of primate history some 500 million years in the future, where the last primates live in symbiosis with a tree, and a surprising side line story is a Von Neumann machine is the only this that survives the human era. I reckon he might use these in another story in the future.

Stephen Baxter is a great author for me, I have read many of his books and this one is better than the rest.