Aw, Frack, Not Again!

I'm hoping it was just the heat last night, but last night the video card on my laptop started freaking out again. Lots of white-outs, buzzy video, color skews but not the kind associated with backlight failure. Really nasty stuff. It would come and go; it was a really bad time for it, too, considering I was dealing with financials and legal at the time.

At least my desktop is up and running-- sort-of. I've got the fileserver working great, but the gaming side of it is still dead. No X server with 3D accelleration yet. Bummer.

Winterfair Gifts, by Lois McMaster Bujold

So, having not read anything really compelling recently, I finally picked up Lois McMaster Bujold's Winterfair Gifts (huzzah for fictionwise!), which had been lying around in a dusty folder on my laptop since I had bought it for myself last Christmas.

I'm not going to give anything away, other than to say that it is not a science fiction story. Nothing SFnal happens. No exploding starships or menacing robots, no nanotechnological threats or reverse polarities. It is, like most of Ms. Bujold's stories, about people, and the way they interact with one another. It is a lovely story, told from the point of view of Roic, the armsman who was so cruelly humiliated in A Civil Campaign, and features Taura, the genetically engineered super-solider, uncovering a plot to make Miles' marriage hell.

Ms. Bujold is rapidly becoming a penbreaker for me: a writer who makes the tragic, the comic, and the tender so effortlessly easy that I can only reach the end of her books a little teary-eyed and muttering, "When I grow up, I wanna write like Lois."

(Yeah, and Helprin, and Clute, and Weber, and Lem, and Yoshino, and Ohnogi, and all the other stylists and writers over the years who I have admired.)