View From a Hotel Window, 3/28/17: Dallas!
Posted on March 28, 2017 Posted by John Scalzi 30 Comments
For the parking lot aficionados, bask in the glory of not one, not two, but three entirely separate parking structures! Parkingpalooza! That really catches us up on the parking lots, which had been a bit sparse the last few days.
Also: Hello, Dallas! Tonight at 7 you can see me at Half Price Books! So do! I will be lonely without you. All of you. Every single citizen of Dallas. Yes.
Tomorrow: Chicago, my collegiate stomping grounds! Volumes Bookcafe at 7pm. The event is sold out (yikes!).
And then I get to go home for a few days. Wheee!
Links for you today: A review of The Collapsing Empire at Ars Technica: The Collapsing Empire is a hilarious tale of humanity’s impending doom. And then, from me: Five Books I Was Thinking Of When I Wrote The Collapsing Empire. Enjoy!
Should that be “Parkingpalooza!™” ?
And still jealous there isn’t one of these events near me :(
Welcome to Dallas. I presume you are going to be at the Half Price Books flagship store on NW Highway? If so, great store.
Is it just me, or is that parking structure in the foreground lacking in anything to stop cars from plummeting over the edge? Some of the spaces have concrete bollards, but others have nothing but a bit of wire. Don’t hit the gas accidentally when you meant to hit the brake!
Wow, you even snuck a little street parking in there too, just to be complete. Of course, Dallas would be a good place to get a parkingpalooza going. Congrats on all the frequent flier miles!
Am I to understand that if I come to this event in Dallas, I will be able to touch a Hugo Award winner?
Having followed the link to your list of books from which you borrowed ideas for CE, I’m glad you’ve chosen Banksian names for your ships. You’re in good company–cf. SpaceX’s autonomous “drone ship” landing barges.
For you fans of (the late, alas) Iain Banks–check out “Raw Spirit,” his documentary / travelogue about visiting _every_last_damn_distillery_ in his native Scotland. Epic research, epic hangovers.
Just finished it, and I loved it. But I can see why some people think it is short. Especially if e-reading and you don’t get a sense of how much book is left.
I would elaborate but I can’t think of how to without spoiling things, so I won’t.
Now ANOTHER series I am dying for another installment of. SCALZI!!!!! (And BUTCHER!!!! and ROTHFUSS!!!!!!!)
Three carparking buildings! and hardly any cars!
WHY did they build them? Just to satisfy the whims of the one, the only, JS?
Read the review…shouldn’t she disclose she is a fellow Tor author too?
It’s about time you got a decent hotel. In those last few fleabags, there wasn’t a parking lot to be seen.
Are you sure “emperox” is a real word? I can’t find it in our fairly fat dictionary. To me it sounds like a medicine. “Take two Emperox and call the office in the morning for the first available appointment.” Might it be a recent foreign language borrowing?
Of course, if you are writing science fiction, you may want unreal words; just because it sounds like a medicine to me doesn’t mean it will to everybody.
Hi Tom Combs,
The Kindle now has actual page #’s for some books, and you can set it for all of them to show the percentage of text left. I haven’t tried any of the other brands.
KiwiSteve: They are actually camouflage for the giant robot launching ramps.
That is indeed lots of parking.
Emperox may be a nonslarkish English flutzpah, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context. And isn’t that what really matters?
It’s kind of depressing to see these rapid-fire window views. In any one of these cities (and I’ve lived/worked in many of them (Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston), there is so much to see and do, but it doesn’t seem that you have time to see much more than the view from your hotel window and the interior of a bookstore.
From the Ars Technica review:-
“Instead of a portentous narrator telling us about impending doom, it feels like we have the wise-cracking Scalzi spinning a yarn over beers in the mess hall.”
How refreshing! And not just the beer.
cptbutton: what are the giant robots for? Are these robots the cunning plan of Emperox Donald to bring jobs back to America. They fly down to Mexico and pick up whole factories and carry them back to America. The only question though is if they have enough room on board to bring the trained workers as well.
Positively a pretty pile of parking places. I prefer the previous picture of the pool, it looks pleasant and peaceful.
All those parking lots-the words of Big Yellow Taxi come to mind.
Hope you didn’t have too much trouble with that weather blowing through overnight. Over 110,000 people without power next door to you in Ft. Worth.
Per Big Yellow Taxi, wouldn’t that make Dallas paradise? Not too sure about that. Just stayed up all night, started and finished Collapsing Empire. Bugger work! Great read! I really enjoyed it. Now I have to wait for the sequel? Damn, but I’m not the most patient sort.
The physical book is a smaller format than most of my hardcovers, it felt tiny by comparison.
We’re fine over here. I have a direct flight today, so that will help in terms of flying; even if late I’ll still get to where I’m going.
“…isn’t that what really matters?” Kevin glorped vloomily.
And now I must go reread the Marvin-and-the-mattresses scene. Kevin has put his finger on the secret: use a quippling bunch of glomphy words, not just one!😄
You should do the event at the hotel. At least there’d be plenty of parking for everyone coming to see you.
“the Flow, a natural feature of space-time that allows ships to enter a kind of subspace zone.”
Is that kinda like the Zones in “Fire Upon the Deep”?
It’s not like the Zones. In Vinge’s novels, the laws of physics vary with distance from galactic center. Near the core, the Unthinking Depths with no FTL, only very minimal intelligence possible. We’re in the Slow Zones – we can think but we can’t go faster than light. Further out, in The Beyond, you can have FTL travel and communication, AI and antigravity. Beyond that, in the Transcend, things get Godlike. The Flow seems more like ocean currents for FTL.
Damnit me, you mean trade winds, not ocean currents. Stop posting while uncaffeinated.
Of your inspirations, the only one I haven’t read is Banks. The rest I love a lot. I’m going right now to Amazon and correct that gap.
On preview, my English has just a passing resemblance to proper English, but I don’t know how to fix it.
Hmm, I count 4 parking structures, plus one parking lot way in the background. The structures foreground right seem to be for separate buildings for 2, the foreground structure on the right, then the one next to the brown building in the middle. Behind all that there seems to be a church parking lot as well. Am I misunderstanding the rules of the game?
Derp. 3rd structure I reference is on my other right, not on the right right.