There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. The cyber-prophets were wrong here. The virtual is becoming more real. It wants to penetrate and map out our real lives and social relationships. We are no longer encouraged to act out some role, but forced to be “ourselves” (which is no less theatrical or artificial).
Book: Black Magic Sanction
ISBN-13: 978-0061138034
Author: Kim Harrison
Series: Book 8 of the The Hollows / Rachel Morgan series
Publisher: Eos
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Release: February 23, 2010
Length: 496 pages (Hardcover)
Rating: C+ (75/100)
Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan series continues to be one of the most entertaining series in the urban fantasy market, standing head and shoulders above most of the formulaic flotsam flooding the genre.
In a genre suffering from a surfeit of gruff, morally ambivalent private detectives, Kim Harrison’s The Hallows series is a breath of fresh air. Her protagonist, Rachel Morgan, is the closest thing the genre has to a female Harry Dresden, which is high praise among urban fan enthusiasts. Her plots are tumultuous joyrides. Her story premises are extremely innovative in a genre that’s rapidly growing stale.
In fact, the single greatest flaw of the series is that Harrison generates more potential than a single book a years can possibly fulfill. Now, if only she’d repeal the “G” rating, let her protagonist stray from the straight and narrow now and again, and butch up the fight scenes!
As it stands, however, this series still comes highly recommended, and while this isn’t the best book of the lot, it is a worthy addition to the series and a major step up from the previous installment, White Witch, Black Curse, which felt a bit like a holding pattern.
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1457
The Gutenberg Bible is printed by Johannes Gutenberg. While it isn’t the first book to be printed using Gutenberg’s movable type system, it will become the first popular work produced by the machine.
1895
The first motion picture shown on a screen is presented by Auguste and Louis Lumière during a private screening for the Société d’Encouragement à l’Industrie Nationale. An invited audience at forty-four spectators at the Rue de Rennes in Paris, France, view the silent documentary film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (“Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory and Exiting the Factory”), a film they shot especially for the occasion. The film is a recording of workers leaving the Lumières’ own factory in Lyon, which manufactures photographic products. The workers stream out, most on foot, some with their bicycles, followed by those with cars. Several more such screenings will follow before the first public exhibition at the Salon Indien du Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris on December 28. Though the “film” is only 46 seconds long, it will go down in history as the first true motion picture. The Lumières will soon begin opening cinemas in Berlin, Brussels, London, and New York to exhibit their films.
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We have to think about the digital layers we are laying down now in order to benefit future generations. We should be optimistic that civilization will survive this challenging century, and put some effort into creating the best possible world for those who will inherit our efforts.
1684
Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers Tethys and Dione, two moons of Saturn with a refractor telescope.
1859
The first Zoological Society is incorporated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following the disruption of the Civil War, the society will establish the country’s first Zoo.
1925
Wolfgang Pauli publishes his “exclusion principle” at the young age of twenty-four, in an article in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik. The Pauli exclusion principle states that two fermions, such as electrons, cannot be in the same quantum state at the same time. In 1945, Pauli will be awarded a Nobel Prize for this fundamental contribution to the science of quantum mechanics.
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In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their “large loves and heavenly charities.”
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