The MTA recently launched a new website, one with which I’m quite happy.  It addresses many of the complaints I had about the old site, and is, in general, much more usefully laid out.

The most obvious change is the new layout of the front page.  They’ve replaced the old static navigation with a table showing the current status of each area of service: bus, subway, light rail, MARC, commuter bus, and paratransit.  For each of those, there’s a color-coded button indicating the general health of the service, followed by a brief line of text giving an overview.  If additional detail is available, there’s a link to the full description.  (And that link is a normal one—no opening in a new window and no javascript.  I’m pleased with that.)

Finally, the table has links down the righthand side to the schedules for each service area.  The schedules are arranged nicely, with HTML and PDF available for everything.

Also of note is the removal of the trip planner from the site, a move that was long overdue.  They say they’ll put it back up if they can get it to work.  (The MTA used nicer wording than that, of course.)

Well, it appears that I’m listed on Blogshares, so I’ll drop their icon into this entry to claim it.

While Perdido Street Station certainly falls under the broad-reaching umbrella of “speculative fiction”, it’s hard to pin it further than that.  Like the city of New Crobuzon and many of its inhabitants, the book is a blend of several things; there are fantasy aspects and steampunk aspects and horror aspects and probably half a dozen other sub-sub-genres scattered throughout.

There are many good things about the book, but the most immediately obvious is Miéville’s writing style.  When he’s being descriptive, his prose drips adjectives, each chosen for just the right shading of connotations.  As I read, I could almost feel the sludge-filled river or the miasma of smoke above the industrial sector.  And after I stopped reading, my mind would race along thought passageways, seeking to maintain the same dense, rapid flow of words to which it had become accustomed.  Many scenes left me breathless with their coiled tension, the languor of subsequent events providing some relief.

The world in which New Crobuzon exists is well thought-out and very detailed.  It’s obvious that Miéville has put significant effort into fleshing things out.  All of the parts hold together, which is important, because part of the enjoyment derives from exploring this whole other world, with cactus-people and insect-headed women and demons and causal-spinning spiders and well, you get the idea.  Many of the details presented tie back into the story eventually, but plenty of things exist simply because they would be there in a complete world.

The story itself is good, as well.  There are too many branches and joinings to describe succinctly; you’ll have to read it yourself to learn of Lin and Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin and Too Too Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected and everyone else.

In short, it’s a well-written book with a beautiful, distinct writing style.  Go read it.

After the tedious Quicksilver, Ilium was a welcome change.  It’s a wonderful blend of science fiction and Greek myth.

As Simmons’ Hyperion was infused with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so Ilium works from Homer’s Iliad.  One of the central events of the book is the siege of Troy.  In Ilium, however, the gods are more science fiction than fantasy—they accomplish their majestic feats via nanotechnology and quantum manipulation.  And the events in the Iliad are only a rough third of the events in Ilium.

The book opens with the words of a twentieth-century Homeric scholar, in a very deliberate reference to the opening of the Iliad.  That scholar has been resurrected by the gods and sent to observe the unfolding of events that shaped the Iliad.  The following chapter introduces humans living on Earth several thousand years past the 20th century, in a world largely abandoned—the “post-humans” meddled with the planet, cleaned up some of their mess, and left it to the old-style humans, whose lives they continue to regulate.  The third chapter sets the stage for the third storyline, involving sentient organic/inorganic machines that live and work among the moons of Jupiter.

Into all three storylines, the reader is dropped without much backstory; the shape of the world in which the characters live must be gleaned from details in the story’s telling.  And the threads don’t tie themselves together until a distance into the book.

The single best thing about the book, however, is the writing.  Simmons does a very good job of taking these disparate threads, blending them together while painting the backdrop for the story, and weaving a thoroughly engaging tale.

Ilium certainly deserves its Hugo nomination.  I can’t speak to whether it should win, since I haven’t read most of its competitors, but if it does, I’ll not be disappointed.

Following in Friday’s footsteps, the MTA gave me troubles getting to work this morning.

The bus I caught going into the city (bus #8877) was stuck on a hill for some time, because the transmission wouldn’t shift into forward.  (I’m not sure how long we were there, since I didn’t think to check my watch, but I missed two Light Rail trains, so it was at least half an hour.)  The driver tried a number of variations on “roll backwards and then gun the engine” but nothing seemed to work.  Eventually, something caught and the bus crept up the hill as people held their breath.

The driver said that she had called for a replacement bus several hours previously (apparently, this had happened earlier today, too), but nothing had been forthcoming.