Not enough "good stuff" - buy Holst's "The Planets"
933018
I was an admirer of The Right Stuff's score for years, and constantly frustrated by the fact that I couldn't find the complete soundtrack to it.  I bought this version through a catalog, and was pretty disappointed by it.  It's a symphonic suite, in the same way that the "Victory at  Sea" suite compresses 100's of minutes of music into 15 minutes - the  themes are there, but the composition just ain't.  If you really like the  score, it's still worth the purchase, but don't even bother to listen to  the North and South stuff.  Five years ago, riding in my car on the way to  work I happened to have the classical station on and I nearly choked on my  coffee to hear what I thought was the most memorable musical sequence from  the John Glenn orbit scene.  I turned the volume WAY UP, and enjoyed it  tremendously.  At the end, I found that I had been listening to Holst's  "The Planets", specifically, "Jupiter".  I later  found that The Right Stuff incorporates Holst in other parts of the movie.  If you're a fan, I suggest you buy one of the many versions of "The  Planets" that's out there, and pay special attention to  "Mars" and "Jupiter".  It's a nice complement to this  CD, and fills some of the gaps.  There are several compositions in it that  have nothing to do with the movie, but it's a classic, and well worth the  12 bucks you'll spend on it.
3385685
A couple of the stories in here are basically: awesome. It's likely you've already heard of the Greg Egan phenomenon: just go ahead and buy this collection.

There are a couple of complaints you can easily make about author G. Egan:

(1) We live in the era of @!$@# "left-wing" sci-fi. And Egan is definitely part of that. "Green" sci-fi and "sexual politics" sci-fi is staggeringly boring. Unfortunately let us say half of Egan's writing is firmly an example of staggeringly boring "green" sci-fi and "sexual politics" sci-fi. So be prepared to just flick through the pages of that.

(2) Setting that issue aside, some of these stories are just ridiculously longer than they need be for any reason. A basic sort of "needs a great editor" problem.

Setting those two issues aside, sci-fi is all about Ideas. (Ultimately, I think, sci-fi is about "what it means to be human"...that large question emerges with the space futures, and now AI futures, which technology laid before us: so, sci-fi was born.)  So, if you remember that hit of reading Asimov when there was a "really good idea" ... you'll capture that "hit" again with Greg Egan.  Enjoy!
3915517
I am not one to normally write a negative review, but I was really disappointed in this book. My disappointment was not due to the author's skills however. The book itself is well-written and articulate as far as it goes.

Rather, I was disappointed because there is not much depth at all provided about Ms. Leavitt herself. In fairness, I should have been forewarned by the apologia given by the author at the beginning of the book. The author indicated in the first pages that there was not a lot of additional or archival information available about Ms. Leavitt, aside from the achievements that she is already famous for. Thus, we do NOT learn much about Ms. Leavitt's life, motivation or personality. In a real sense, I kind of wonder why the book was written at all; as filler, a lot of the book is about Hubble and his discovery of an expanding Universe and there is much about Shapley, Pickering, and other figures. And of course there is a description of Ms. Leavitt's notable contribution to astronomy concerning her observations of Cepheid variables and the period/luminosity relation.

In fairness, if you were expecting to learn a lot about Ms. Leavitt's life, motivation and personality, the book is short on this. As indicated, the author honestly admits as much at the beginning of the book. Unfortunately, as a result, he was forced to fill the book with material about others (Hubble, etc.) and we really end up with no better insight into Ms. Leavitt than would have been the case had the book not been written. The title is appropriate in a sense because "The Untold Story" of Ms. Leavitt's life still remains untold.
1727948
Mr. Tyson has a nice speaking voice and manner, but he is certainly no replacement for Carl Sagan.  The topics covered are arranged very poorly, and he jumps from astronomy to physics to biology to anthropology and to history in a most disconcerting way.  Most viewers would, I'm sure, much prefer a more linear approach, as in The History of the World in Two Hours.  Tyson's presentation is at about a 10th grade level, give or take.  He doesn't hide his Leftist political views, making it clear that he believes in anthropogenic global warming, even though the data has been fudged and there has been no warming for 17 years!  His comparison of the Earth's situation with that of Venus amounts to almost scientific malpractice; he is oblivious to the carbon cycle and the negative feedback loop involving CO2:  the more CO2, the more food, the more plants, the more animals, the less CO2.  In addition, he spouts the usual "modern physics" nonsense of the nuclear theory of the atom, the illogic of Quantum Mechanics, and the absurdity of the Big Bang, black holes, and worm holes.  All in all, I cannot recommend this work.  You would be better off reading the Random House Encyclopedia, with all of its illustrations (if not videos), and which is very, very nicely organized, then slogging through this series of videos.
2399500
Okay, this is a great value - cost per cd ratio - from Brilliant classics. Let's get that out of the way. The problem for me is the music. Many of these symphonies, while technically masterful and beautifully performed (they were recorded in the palace hall where most of Haydn's work was originally performed), are simply not memorable or interesting. The later Paris and London symphonies are definitely worth acquiring via a more inexpensive collection. But the musical part of my brain glazed over as I tried listening to the rest of these. There's little inspiration here, in my opinion. One movement sounds like any other (with some exceptions). I have come to believe that, "you hear one Haydn symphony and you've heard them all." There's a blandness about this music. Even the movements I was initially pleased by did not warrant a second or third listen.

****Update****
9/8/15 I've had this a while and I take back everything I wrote above. I've listened to this off and on since my purchase and I've come to appreciate what great music this is. My deepest apologies, Mr. Haydn.
1394565
I'm going with 3 stars (  ).  At first I was thinking down from 3.5, but after reading my extensive notes on these stories it is more like up from 2.5 stars.

This is not the book I expected.  Having seen an old paperback copy in my garage, I check my ebook library and saw I had this ebook and the audio.  Yea me!  The Menace from Earth is the title of ONE of the stories in the book.  From a glance at the paperback's back cover I wasn't alerted to this fact. In for a dime, in for a dollar...

The assorted publications that have the story The Manace from Earth have different book titles.

Below are the stories in this edition:

*The Year of the Jackpot (The first story)
*By His Bootstraps (second story).
*Columbus Was a Dope (third story)
*The Menace from Earth (fourth story)
*Sky Line (fifth story)
*Goldfish Bowl (Sixth Story)
*Project Nightmare (Seventh Story)
*Water is for Washing (8th & Last Story)

Twice I went back to the garage to dust off that old copy to see if I was reading the ebook described on the back cover.  I was certainly confused and what it says absolutely has nothing to do with the story "The Menace From Earth"

If you're a Heinlein fan then getting your hands on this edition of short stories is an addition to your treasure trove.  If you're looking for a great read... only one or two of these stories will pull their weight.  A couple of them are a disappointment and the rest or ok.

I figure if you're going for it, best that you read them all and decide for yourself.  I recommend for RAH fans and maybe people wanting to study story structure or such a thing.  It being a few days short of 2015 NaNoWriMo (search if you don't know), I'm sure some aspiring SF/F writer could learn a thing or two about storytelling.
78052
In the fifth edition of "Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians", the article on Rachmaninov affirms that the popularity of his works is proof they aren't very good. By that reasoning, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms must be even worse composers.

But there is _some_ truth to the idea that popularity and "quality" are inversely related. Ray Bradbury, arguably the most popular 20th century writer of fantasy and science fiction, is a perfect example. Bradbury is a writer for people who have no imaginations of their own.

I read a lot of science fiction when I was young. (Fantasy had not become as popular as it is today.) By a wide margin, no writer struck me as consistently awful as Bradbury.

Why? None was quite so _obvious_ -- Bradbury telegraphed his punches in the titles of his stories! His treatment of any idea was often heavy-handed and sentimental. And he claimed priority for any work with even the least resemblance to one of his (qv, "The Foghorn" and "Beast from 20,000 Fathoms"). I don't know whether "Boys, Grow Giant Mushrooms in Your Basement!" predates Philip K. Dick's "The Father-Thing", but if it had, Bradbury surely would have sued.

It's about time (while Mr. Bradbury is still alive) to proclaim him the semi-competent mediocrity he is. There, I said it. He also needs a kick to the knees for his inane use of  Whitman's "I sing the body electric", a reference to human sensuality and sexuality, to title a story about an asexual, unsensual android.

I sing the body electric;

The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?

And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

I find it amazing Ray Harryhausen has put up with him for 70 years.
4317064
This series has won multiple awards, perhaps just because it is the largest body of work about Mars.  It certainly gets points for ambition of scope. But for me, it falls far short of expectations.

I am reading it because I want to see and feel what it would be like to live on an alien planet and create a liveable ecosystem there. I am fascinated with the biological science of it all:  how terraforming works, how the underground aquifers are released, the icecap is melted, how vegetation begins to take root among the rocks. The changing colors of the sky as the atmosphere thickens.

I am also interested in the societies of Mars. Workers live in bubble cities and rebels live "off the grid" in communal habitats underground. There is a spiritual movement called the `aerophany"; adherents seek a mystical union with the spirit of Mars.

All of these details are handled wonderfully. The strength of this series is that it makes living on Mars seem real, with gritty nuts & bolts details. The scenery is certainly depicted beautifully. By now, Mars has become a "real" place in my imagination

But this same quality backfires. The characters take endless trips back and forth from one impact crater or cliff to another. The first few trips across the exotic  Martian landscape are fascinating.  By the 20th time I wish the author would get a blue pencil out. The books would be about half as big as they are. (Green Mars is 800 pages.) I'm not that interested in descriptions of the bubble cities, which are essentially the same as cities on Earth (although with no automobiles).

What irritates me most about this series is that it stops being about Mars and becomes about the `revolution' of the Martian inhabitants against greedy multinationals who control Earth and Mars too. Yes, this is interesting future speculation, up to a point. But after many, many scenes of  polemics, discussions and street demonstrations, one gets the impression the author is re-living his own past as a radical in the 60's. (I don't know whether he lived thru the 60s or not, but I did.) This plot element is also a repeat of the latter part of Red Mars. Spoiler: both Red Mars and Green Mars end with anarchists creating a flood on the planet. What's with repeating the same plot over and over? Only famous writers can get away with this kind of bad writing.

Many of the story developments are just implausible...such as the chaotic do it yourself terraforming that has begun in Red Mars and continues here. Also implausible is the group of anarchists whose response to political upheaval is to blow things up. And the most unnecessary element of this series is the longevity treatments. This enables us to be bored with the soap-opera emotional problems of the First Hundred, now about 140 years old. Get these guys off stage and let some new characters have a chance!

I will probably grit my teeth and read the 3rd book, Blue Mars, because I want to be there when Mars gets an ocean and becomes a "real' planet where you can take a walk in the fresh air. But I will be doing a lot of skimming, page flipping and gritting my teeth. I'm still looking for the definitive Mars novel that will fill me a sense of wonder, rather than boredom
259362
The 5 star reviews here are likely plants. They either have one review or one book review in their profiles, they are highly suspect. This is a decent book and is competently written, particularly for an amateur author, but the story is ploddingly slow. I kept waiting for a big reveal once the crew lands on the planet but at 75% through it hasn't materialized. The authoritarian organization the crew is collecting specimens for is unclear, the threat approaching the planet is unclear three fourths of the way through the book. Way too much of this story is mired in minutia and the crew just never feels like they are in real danger. This would be a 5 star science fiction story if it had picked up the pace and had some sense of peril.

I do appreciate the research process and logic the crew uses in assessing the flora and fauna of the planet. The science is intelligently written and well thought out and some of the lifeforms are intriguing but none of this goes anywhere with any pace. This author has talent and has a great story in them I'm sure.

 I have 1,500 reviews on Amazon, most literary. I never take any free product and always give an objective opinion, regardless of how it will be received.
3741297
Looks like SGM are running out of steam. You can't really blame them though since Dan Rathbun and Nils Frykdahl already used their best ideas on the Idiot Flesh albums, "Fancy" in particular, so most everything on "Of Natural History" sounds like a tired rehash of past days - "old things in new packages" indeed; even Carla Kihlstedt is not safe from it ("What Shall We Do Without Us?" = "Patchen" from her solo album). Too bad the irony struck this hard, so most of it remains overlong, repetitive regurgitating of underdeveloped ideas eventually crashing down in a wall of noise (esp. "Freedom Club" and "Babydoctor" suffer from that problem). There is still some worthy material though in the form of the first 3 tracks and "Gunday's Child" which slighty lift it above the mediocre.
2526638
Silverberg has written some good short stories and Asimov has written hundreds of science books, so why is this book have neither plausible science nor decent characters, dialog or plot?

This novel has more filler in it than it does actual writing. The characters tell themselves and each other what has just happened every other page. Shame on you, Silverberg.

And I was amazed that, among the other ridiculous failures in logic here, that Asimov would expect us to believe that the planet causing the eclipse would be invisible with 5 other suns. Shame on Asimov.

And shame on me for reading this misbegotten stepchild of a padded out short story.

Good thing amazon allows kindle returns within 7 days. Thanks, amazon!
1243420
A rogue planet would most definitely cause the anomalies that science has noted in our solar system, and I applaud the author for his diligent research. However, he was wasting his time as far as I am concerned, in trying to mesh 4 creation stories together to say they all refer to the rogue star passing  through our solar system!  How did the Sumerian astronomers even SEE what Mars was going through, let alone Earth and Planet X colliding and Earth being moved out of its orbit? They didn't even have telescopes, let alone observatories! Of course they could not see (or survive) these events! So, in my opinion, they arose from the fertile imagination of some long ago Grandpa who answered a child's question of "Where did the stars come from?"

As for the star of Bethlehem and the Christ's return, this is NONSENSE! Save your money...
273872
Oh Gawd! This is not a good book. And I'm clearly not alone to think so, as there are so many unflattering reviews of it. For starters, there is no story.  The first thing of note that happens is on page 147. Then we're treated to agonizingly boring march along a tunnel that ends on page 206 only. I switched to fast reading and persevered, but it didn't get any more interesting. Eventually I got to page 482 (out of 657) and decided to give up.

The author presents visions of the Solar System, fully colonized by humans from Mercury to Pluto, the visions being as trite as they are wrong. Nobody in their sane mind will build "a city" on Mercury, moving on rails to stay on the dark side of the planet all the time. This, incidentally, reminds me of "Absolution Gap" by Alastair Reynolds. Robinson's vision of asteroids with their insides scooped up to form rotating habitats, reminds me of "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.

But, you see, this is all there is to it: visions. As the story's heroine, Swan, hops around the whole solar system (who pays for it?), there is little meaning to her hopping, other than gluing the visions together.

The book is permeated with mundane and tedious enviro-preaching, outlining a catastrophic picture of overheated Earth--a yet another nonsense--and animals, preserved in the Rama-like habitats, being returned to the Canadian Taiga in soap bubbles falling from the sky. The author wrote a half of this book, easily, while on drugs. This much is clear.

I love good SF. But more than anything else, I love a good, tight story, well written, well constructed, displaying true mastery of language, not a word too many, not a word too few. Here though you drown in drivel. Three quarters of the book is unnecessary. Why then should you pay for it?
3853048
You can read all the hype above.  But it just doesn't cover the entire story.
Chances are, if you really like this band from their spacier explorations, that you've already gotten this disc.  However, if you loved  Porc Tree for the depth of sound and space--this release does NOT continue  that sound.
This really disappointed me.  Yes, I know that last year's  release also was more song oriented, as is Lightbulb Sun.  But this one is  SO introspective, that it sounds like Steve Wilson's life has gone to hell.  Very limited instrumental space.  It seems that "voyage" of the  tree is over.
So if you're looking for more Floydian/Porc Tree  atmospheric music--it ain't here.  If you want a collection of really sad  songs, buy this.
509594
I'm a big fan of HPL and try to get everything out by him. But i must say that there are many better one-volume introduction to HPL out there right now. Try  The Call of Cthulhu (Penguin Modern Classics)&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Call-of-Cthulhu-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141187069/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Call of Cthulhu (Penguin Modern Classics)</a>&nbsp;This is imho the best introduction to HPL.
The stories get 5 stars, this volume gets 2.
3140204
Not a well-written or thoughtfully composed work. I guess I was looking for more science and less popularity in the book. Too much concern with the lives of the scientists and not enough with the meaning of their work for our future. Dr. Cullen brings in many references, but, as a "world's foremost climatologist," did not seem to add much of of her own research.  I found myself skipping sections due to unnecessary amounts of repetitions that served only to increase the book's page count. One point I strongly take issue on is Dr. Cullen's use of the phrase "at stake" as it applies to global warming. She offers the reader the chance to go out and make things right and save our world when, in fact, the climate changes made to date are not correctable within periods of thousands of years. So there is nothing "at stake." Dr. Cullen needs to re-phrase to admit to the readers that change is a done deal with no chance of correction and that mankind will have to physically move locations to survive. She does give a nod to the good future of northern places like Canada and Greenland where the future of mankind can continue. Odd is the inclusion of New York City as an example of future climate/weather change when all nine other examples are focused on huge land mass areas that span hundreds or thousands of miles. I suspect this was a bow to the publisher or editor for the sake of popularity and, therefore, sales. The price of the hardback and the paperback indicate that sales were not very good. I found myself skipping sections due to unnecessary amounts of repetitions that served only to increase the book's page count. Okay start but does need revision.
3296260
The way some people write about these guys, you would think they're the second coming of Neu! or the reincarnation of Kraftwerk.  Well, I wish they were. I want to like this CD a lot more than I do, but I've had it for a  few months and not played it more than a couple of times.  The music is  just too static.  Even with Neu! or Kraftwerk, who these guys obviously  show a debt to, the music evolves and there are little details that jump  out  at you on repeated listenings.  On this CD, though, what you hear is  pretty much what you get.  It seems a lot more detailed and intricate than  it really is.  There are some appealing things on here and some good ideas,  but they are not explored in enough depth to make this a really essential  recording.  It does make good background music, but if I wanted good  background music, I have Eno's ambient recordings for that.  Overall I  found it disappointing after all the hype I had heard about this band.