Rebecca's Reviews: City of Ember

City of Ember is built upon an intriguing premise. A two-hundred year-old city deep beneath the earth is the last refuge of humankind. But supplies are running short, the mighty electric generator is breaking down, time is running out, and somewhere along the line the secret instructions for returning to the surface have been lost.

When it comes to atmosphere, Ember's got it. Rusty pipe-works drip and spurt, a web of overhead lamps illuminates the drab city streets, citizens wear thrice made-over clothes, and no one dares to venture into the darkness beyond. The characters are simple but compelling, and the best parts of the story focus on the choices that different people make when faced with the imminent collapse of everything they know. Do you wait for someone to come and save you? Do you horde supplies for yourself while everyone else around you goes hungry? Do you keep patching the pipes and hope for the best? Or do you risk everything to find a real solution?

The only thing keeping City of Ember from going down as a great science fiction classic, in my mind at least, was the cheap movie tricks that made the film feel like a grade-B clunker instead of a serious work of art. Cheap trick number one : the giant mole. My daughter could not get over the giant mole. An hour later she was still complaining, "If there were a mole that size running around in the pipe tunnels, someone would have noticed it and killed it! They wouldn't let it go around eating people!"

The giant mole was not in the book. Ember author Jeanne DuPrau is probably rolling her eyes. I hope they paid her well for the movie rights.

Love My Ceramic Cook-Top

Our old stove started to give out a few months ago. Two of the burners stopped working. So, after putting up with it for a while, we caved in and bought a new stove. This time I decided I wanted one of those flat cook tops, the type without ring pans. They looked so easy to clean.

Little did I know.

Ceramic cook tops are not really easy to clean. They are possible to clean. Ring pans are absolutely impossible to keep clean for long. Something falls down there while you're cooking, scorches on, and then never completely comes off. On the other hand, when something drips onto the ceramic cook top, it does scrub off again, if you scrub it right away and you use the nifty ceramic cook top cleaning cream.

The nifty ceramic cook top cleaning cream is a little like car wax. You wipe it on, then polish it in before you even start cooking. It cleans and protects the cook top, and makes it easy to clean up scorched drips. There have been a couple of drips that resisted even the nifty cook top cleaning cream, so I gently scraped them off with the edge of a metal spatula.

So far my ceramic cook top has withstood encounters with my giant boiling water canner and my cast iron griddles. As soon as the cook top cooled I polished off all the black marks, dripped syrup, and hard-water deposits, and it looks as good as new. I love my new ceramic cook top.

REAL METEOR IN THE NEWS!

Perfect timing! Scientists at Mount Lemmon observatory near Tucson, Arizona spotted a tiny asteroid about a day before it struck the earth's atmosphere over Egypt, burning up in a spectacular display that outshone the moon. Here's the article:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14897-space-rock-collides-with-earth-right-on-time.html

This is the FIRST, the very first time an object from outer space has been spotted before it hits. All you Earthcrosser readers will be interested in this link to animated observational photos of the asteroid, which perfectly match a certain scene in my book:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/D691.gif

Yes, I feel very vindicated today, thank you.

Thank You Readers!

Thanks to everyone who read Earthcrosser and got back to me with comments! I am pleased with your responses and very, very excited to start my third draft.

The main comment I've heard is that the setting is not consistent. Towards the end of the book, all of a sudden there are helicopters, guns, trucks, military bases, and all sorts of things that must have been hiding just over the ridge if they could descend upon us so quickly and save the day. It makes the reader wonder why the characters had so many problems due to lack of technology at the beginning of the book.

I have some good ideas for ways to fix this. Hee hee.

If any of you have other remarks, you can put them in the comments or e-mail them to me.

The Writer's Keyboard

My poor old keyboard! The only letters that hadn't been rubbed off were Q,W, T,Y,U,I,P,G,Z,X, and B. I can't write much with that.

I typically touch type, but every now and then, especially when I'm typing in a password and can't see what I'm hitting by watching the screen, I just have to look at the keys! So I took my Dremel and etched the missing letters back in.

That should last a little while.

How to Reduce Dependence on Foreign Oil

These last few days I've been overhearing a lot of bellyaching and getting political campaign material in the mail, pointing fingers at the current administration and blaming them for our dependence on foreign oil.

Sure, it is nice to think that it is someone else's problem, and that someone else is going to fix it, but if we are going to end our dependence on foreign oil we are going to have to CHANGE OUR OWN INDIVIDUAL LIFESTYLES.

Here are some easy ways to start:

1. Walk, bike, carpool, or use public transportation whenever possible.
2. Keep your thermostat warmer in the summer (buy a fan) and cooler in the winter (put on a sweater).
3. Make an effort to buy locally produced goods (less shipping, less gas used).
4. Re-use and recycle, especially plastics.
5. Grow some of your own food in your own back yard.
6. Turn off appliances when not in use.

None of that is new and different. You heard it all in elementary school. Let's give it a try! Saves money, saves resources. . . all it takes is time and effort.

Why I Am Against Same-Sex Marriage

As a scientist -

The purpose of reproduction is the continuation of life. A same-sex marriage can not produce new life.

As a citizen -

Marriage is a legal contract between a man, a woman, and society that helps ensure that the children the marriage might produce are given adequate care, protection, and training to become contributing members of the society. Children do best in homes with both a father and a mother, and so society binds a man and woman together by law in order to give their children the best chance possible. Laws that give tax breaks to married people were originally intended to help homes where children are being raised. Same-sex marriages can not produce children, and so I do not believe they should have the same protections as traditional marriages.

You might argue that then by the same token, marriage licenses should not be granted to couples who are infertile. Infertility is a difficult thing to determine. I have more than one friend who was told by their doctor that she and her spouse could not have children but then later she had a child. On the other hand, a same-sex couple can never, never, ever produce a child.

As a Christian -

Marriage is a covenant between a man, a woman, and God by which the man and woman promise to be loyal to one another and to care for the children that God sends them. In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve, man and woman, to be companions for each other. That was His plan from the beginning for the happiness of his children.

As an adult human being -

Sexual feelings are a powerful and important part of human life. But in our modern world when we can so easily cheat nature we tend to forget that the purpose of sexuality is . . . REPRODUCTION. Simple as that. Not just for fun. Not just for a high. Not just for that sense of well being and the wonderful emotional bond it creates with a partner. The purpose of sexuality is to create strong families with a mother and father intimately bound in love and the children brought into the world under that shelter.

Any other use is an abuse. Like taking a prescription drug that hasn't been prescribed.