I always loved mythol­ogy, espe­cially ancient Greek leg­ends. Norse and Egypt­ian mythol­ogy are quite inter­est­ing too and I always tried to deepen my knowl­edge about these leg­ends. I’m not a spe­cial­ist but I know the most impor­tant char­ac­ters because I like to read and those sto­ries seemed quite inter­est­ing back then. I was intrigued because they seemed very sim­i­lar and still so dif­fer­ent. Nowa­days, I don’t read that much books con­cern­ing or involv­ing mythol­ogy. Instead, I play games who are based on myths or I watch TV shows where the ancient sto­ries are deeply involved in the plot, like Star­gate, for instance.

Of course, I soon real­ized that there are some trade-offs, espe­cially with games. You like to know some­thing about mythol­ogy? Don’t trust in games to con­vey the leg­endary deeds of ancient gods. Why not? The Seat­tle Times has the answer. In this short edi­to­r­ial the author makes one impor­tant point: Games aren’t the most reli­able sources for infor­ma­tion on mythol­ogy. That said, I have to admit that they did a much bet­ter job with Star­gate and Star­gate SG-1. The recently played God of War II is pretty impres­sive either, but it doesn’t treat the Greek mythol­ogy with much regard for accu­racy.

Any­way, there are plenty of games and TV shows based on dif­fer­ent mytholo­gies. As long as the cre­ators can meld all the frag­ments into an inter­est­ing and believ­able piece of enter­tain­ment, who cares? Alas, who is look­ing for an edu­ca­tional value in our enter­tain­ment world? All one can hope to achieve is to arouse inter­est in the con­sumers so that they get them­selves immersed. The good old books will surely be around for some time to come, I guess.

Seems like the Church of Eng­land doesn’t take fic­ti­tious depic­tions of its “prop­erty” lightly. With Resis­tance: Fall of Man Sony has released one of the bet­ter launch titles of the PS3. Now the Bishop of Man­ches­ter com­plained that Sony’s deci­sion to recre­ate one of the great cathe­drals with photo-realistic qual­ity just to encour­age peo­ple to have gun bat­tles in this build­ing is “beyond belief and highly irre­spon­si­ble”. Head over to Ars Tech­nica to see what this is all about.

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Sony claimed in a pre­pared state­ment that they believed they had sought all the nec­es­sary per­mis­sions for the inclu­sion of the cathe­dral in the game and also noted that the title is “a fan­tasy sci­ence fic­tion game and is not based on real­ity.” This response isn’t sit­ting well with the Church of England’s employ­ees in Man­ches­ter, who believe they are fac­ing a very real gun prob­lem and feel that the use of their holy space for such a vio­lent scene in the gam­ing under­cuts their work with the community.

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The last time I wrote about the Church med­dling with fic­ti­tious con­tent a Vat­i­can offi­cial called for a boy­cott of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. What I don’t get is that they really go ahead with some­thing like this. What’s the prob­lem? Nei­ther book nor game claimed to depict the truth. I always believed in free­dom of expres­sion but it seems like that doesn’t work any­more. What­ever you say or write you should be pre­pared to get sued. That’s ridicu­lous. Hard work­ing peo­ple who believe in hon­esty should sup­port Evil Spock’s attempt of world dom­i­na­tion. He may be able to set some things right.

It truly is. But that’s not exactly some­thing knew I pulled out of my magic hat. There’s the Small World Project and the Small World Exper­i­ment to prove that. In short, exper­i­ments showed that the aver­age path length for social net­works of peo­ple in the United States is about six. Inter­est­ing stuff but only mildly related to what I’m aim­ing at.

I stum­bled over – mind you, Stum­ble­Upon really sucks – an inter­est­ing site that may prove use­ful to me. It’s some­thing called Literature-Map. Some guys gath­ered some infor­ma­tion on authors and writ­ers and cre­ated an intrigu­ing map because “the closer two writ­ers are, the more likely some­one will like both of them”. Pro­vides a great method to get to know new writ­ers, I guess. At least, it sounds bet­ter than scour­ing dif­fer­ent forums for some recommendations …

It really is, I promise. Yeah, I’ve been away for some time but I had to spend some days with my par­ents, cel­e­brat­ing my grandma’s 90th birth­day. Any­way, long time no post. And so I asked myself what would pos­si­bly be worth some com­plain­ing? At first, I didn’t come up with some­thing inter­est­ing but then, all of a sud­den, a recent expe­ri­ence just invaded my cur­rent train of thought: Buy­ing a book. I like to read and read a lot, lit­er­ally scores of books a year. I pre­fer Fan­tasy and Sci-Fi because that’s where there are no bound­aries. The only limit is imposed by the author of the respec­tive book and that’s why any author in these gen­res can let his imag­i­na­tion loose.

Unfor­tu­nately, I’m a bit picky. You know, been there, read that. I’d like to read some­thing new and I seri­ously dis­like – hate would be to strong an emo­tion for fic­ti­tious things, wouldn’t it? – read­ing the nth install­ment of the same old plot cre­ated by Tolkien, for instance. I don’t like the clas­sic good vs. evil sto­ries either and I can’t, for the life of me, fig­ure out why so much of the epic fantasy/sci-fi stuff has to be so homo­ge­neous. Thus, I can’t just walk into the next book store, take a look around and buy a bunch of books. If it only were so easy.

I reg­u­larly scout the local book­store for new mind food but that’s all there is to it. I don’t buy thin books and I sel­dom buy sin­gle nov­els. I like epics and that almost always involves three or more vol­umes. Any­way, I gather some intel, take some pho­tographs and then it’s up to my usu­ally reli­able source of infor­ma­tion, the inter­net, to help me make my deci­sion. I check out sffworld.com and the forum for reviews and some addi­tional thoughts. I like to see some fel­low read­ers to actu­ally rec­om­mend or damn the book in ques­tion. It’s not that I don’t take chances. Some­times I for­get all about these “rules of buy­ing” and just grab a book that looks inter­est­ing to me. The odds are fifty-fifty and that’s the usual result of pick­ing books with­out fur­ther investigation.

I’ve tor­tured myself over the past few weeks because I’m run­ning out of stuff. I needed some new input and I had to look really hard to come up with some books. First off, I was able to grab a copy of The Fate of the Fallen, Vol­ume One of The Song of the Tears – Ian Irvine’s con­tin­u­a­tion of the Three Worlds Cycle. Arguably one of the best series in the whole fan­tasy genre. Next I chose Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover to accom­pany the rest of my sci-fi nov­els. Finally, my Ama­zon order was con­cluded by R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Noth­ing series. I don’t know much about this one but I hope it’ll end in a pleas­ant sur­prise. For now, I’m already look­ing for­ward to hav­ing these books in my pos­ses­sion