The cover for the final volume of Robert Jordan’s and Brandon Sanderson‘s the Wheel of Time, A Memory of Light, has just appeared. Although the artist has changed, from Darrell K. Sweet who passed away before completing his cover to Michael Whelan, I find the cover as appalling as the previous thirteen covers in the series… With the same frozen features and caricaturesque characters, unrealistic depictions (look at the way Rand holds this sword!) and women at the back. I know, I know, I should not expect highly creative covers for fantasy books, but other recent books have managed much better, from Sanderson’s Mistborns (other series of Sanderson do not succeed so well, incl. Elantris) to Abercrombie’s trilogy (and his The Heroes), admittedly the coolest covers so far, to Morgan’s The Steel Remains, to Karen Miller’s series of The prodigal mage … Even the alternative e-book covers for the Wheel of Time are quite acceptable, so I really wonder why the publisher sticks at those ugly and outdated covers. Anyway, this is now a sort of tradition! The final volume is planned for early January 2013, which is in tune with what Brandon Sanderson told us last year when giving a public lecture in Paris. There is much expectation about this book, the culmination of a series I started reading more than 20 years ago!
Archive for Mistborn
And the cover is…just as ugly!
Posted in Books, pictures with tags Brandon Sanderson, Darrell Sweet, e-book, Joe Abercrombie, Karen Miller, Mistborn, Richard Morgan, Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time on May 12, 2012 by xi'anThe Alloy of Law
Posted in Books, Travel with tags alloy, book review, Brandon Sanderson, Cambridge, England, Felix Gilman, Mistborn, steampunk, The Wheel of Time on February 5, 2012 by xi'an
When I saw that The Alloy of Law was half-price in the Cambridge Waterstones, I did not hesitate long in picking the latest Brandon Sanderson‘s book! It is set in the Mistborn universe, with the same chemical principles directing magical powers (allomancy and ferromancy). A terrific concept by the way! However, The Alloy of Law reads much more like a steampunk novel. With a serving of wild (or weird) West. And, in short, it does not read very well… (Even though it reads fast, I was done with it by Sunday evening.)
“Numbers, patterns, movements. People seem erratic, but they actually follow patterns. Find the deviations, isolate the reason why they deviated, and you’ll often learn something. Aluminum on the floor. It’s a deviation.” (p.178)
In a sense, the novel The Alloy of Law best compares with is Gilman’s The Half-made World, that I read about a year ago. Same steampunk basics, same wild wild West atmosphere, same central characters of a female academic chafing at the Victorian constraints imposed by the society, same major role of trains… However, I feel The Half-made World is a successful and convincing construction, while The Alloy of Law sounds like an unfinished attempt. I have been amazed at the number of books published by Sanderson over the past years, especially considering the pressure he is under for completing Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I wish he had spent more time and care in polishing this book! Indeed, it greatly feels like it was rushed, with a neat idea for a backbone, but not enough meat to make the concept stand. There are too many dreary, repetitive, and overly precise descriptions of gun battles, the main male character is shallow (and only too well deserves his nickname of Wax!), the female character is more interesting but still caricaturesque, the overall plot does not make much sense, most of the dialogues are poor (e.g., when explaining “When you make an alloy, you don’t just mix two metals. You make a new one.“, p. 134), and the connection with the original trilogy is almost completely lost! (The fan-made trailer is actually quite well-made, by comparison. And covering about all main features of the book!)
I am certainly not looking forward the second volume in the series…., if any. In fact, the book is presented as a stand-alone novel, but the ending has all the loose threads (main villain still at large, love relations still unresolved, final appearance of a mythical figure, …) to proceed quickly (too quickly!) to a sequel of The Alloy of Law.
1500th, 3000th, &tc
Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian statistics, blog statistics, book reviews, Brandon Sanderson, Millenium, Mistborn, New York, R, R-bloggers, Ross Ihaka, Stieg Larsson, sudoku, thunderstorm on January 8, 2012 by xi'anAs the ‘Og reached its 1500th post and 3000th comment at exactly the same time, a wee and only mildly interesting Sunday morning foray in what was posted so far and attracted the most attention (using the statistics provided by wordpress). The most visited posts:
| Title | Views |
|---|---|
| Home page | 203,727 |
| In{s}a(ne)!! | 7,422 |
| “simply start over and build something better” | 6,264 |
| Julien on R shortcomings | 2,676 |
| Sudoku via simulated annealing | 2,402 |
| About | 1,876 |
| Of black swans and bleak prospects | 1,768 |
| Solution manual to Bayesian Core on-line | 1,628 |
| Parallel processing of independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithms | 1,625 |
| Bayesian p-values | 1,595 |
| Bayes’ Theorem | 1,537 |
| #2 blog for the statistics geek?! | 1,526 |
| Do we need an integrated Bayesian/likelihood inference? | 1,501 |
| Coincidence in lotteries | 1,396 |
| Solution manual for Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R | 1,340 |
| Julian Besag 1945-2010 | 1,293 |
| Tornado in Central Park | 1,093 |
| The Search for Certainty | 1,016 |
Hence, three R posts (incl. one by Julien and one by Ross Ihaka), three (critical) book reviews, two solution manuals, two general Bayesian posts, two computational entries, one paper (with Pierre Jacob and Murray Smith), one obituary, and one photograph news report… Altogether in line with the main purpose of the ‘Og. The most commented posts:
Not exactly the same as above! In particular, the posts about ABC model choice and our PNAS paper got into the list. At last, the top search terms:
| Search | Views |
|---|---|
| surfers paradise | 1,050 |
| benidorm | 914 |
| introducing monte carlo methods with r | 514 |
| andrew wyeth | 398 |
| mistborn | 352 |
| abele blanc | 350 |
| nested sampling | 269 |
| particle mcmc | 269 |
| bayesian p-value | 263 |
| julian besag | 257 |
| rites of love and math | 249 |
| millenium | 237 |
| bayesian p value | 222 |
| marie curie | 221 |
| bonsai | 200 |
(out of which I removed the dozens of variations on xian’s blog). I find it rather sad that both top entries are beach towns that are completely unrelated to my lifestyle and to my vacation places. Overall, more than a half of those entries do not strongly relate to the contents of the ‘Og (even though I did post at length about Saunderson’s Mistborn and Larsson’s Millenium trilogies). At last, the most popular clicks are
which include links to my books on Amazon, Andrew Gelman’s, Terry Tao’s, Radford Neal’s and Romain François’s blogs, the CREST stat students collective blog, and a few arXiv papers of mine’s…
