Last Tuesday I saw "The World Is Not Enough" at a theatre near where I work. James Bond movies are rather formulaic, although not necessarily predictable. Lots of chase scenes, going from location to location, following the villain and dispatching his henchmen. There is a certain comforting reassurance about it all, and Pierce Brosnan makes a good 007. Lots of explosions, lots of action, a slightly surprising plot twist, and overall an enjoyable movie...

Today, I saw "The Green Mile" which is a really good drama. Tom Hanks has become a remarkable dramatic actor. It's a slow developing story, but it remains captivating throughout. Stephen King writes good non-horror stories, showing that he is a good writer. I don't like his horror stories, and since that is so closely tied to him, any project that he's associated with I can't help but think "it's horror". Still, this one was good and there was another one I saw or read that I thought was good too. Anyway, "The Green Mile" has some great acting and a good story, deserving of its good reviews...

On and off I look to see if David Gerrold has finished the next book in his "War Against the Chtorr" series. In this series of rather long novels, Earth has been invaded by an alien ecology. Aliens have infected the Earth with their native lifeforms, both flora and fauna. Not exactly too sure how they did it, probably sending seeds and such through space. Their ecology is a million years more advanced than ours, so their plants and animals run rampant and kill all our plants and animals. The aliens themselves are these large worm-things ten meters long, able to swallow a man whole, who can sprint at speeds of 30 miles per hour. All in all rather fearsome, but very instinctual.

So the worms start appearing and they look like just another Chtorran animal. But the more they are in an area, the more organized they are. Larger worm communities have bigger dwellings and eloborate setups, but it's still all instinctual, genetically ingrained. Either that or the humans haven't found how the worms record information and pass on knowledge. So the series is about the invasion, and how the military handles it. More specifically it focuses on a hero, a sort of normal person caught up in all this, one who becomes quite a good scout-like person -- you know, like in the old west. Still military but a bit too native.

One of the themes is "how is humanity going to survive?" There are groups of people who are pro-Chtorran, mostly as a slave race. There's another group that has sort of gone into regression. They've become simple cattle, who are occassionally eaten by a wandering worm, but inoffensive so they're not all wiped out at once. Then there's the vast majority of whoever's left fighting however they can. It's an interesting topic: how far are we willing to go to survive as a species?

Anyway, four books so far, published about five to ten years ago. Gerrold has done other projects and only recently finished the manuscript for book five. Hopefully it'll be published this year and I get to read it. This is one of several fiction series that I have read. GURPS is still the main role-playing system that I buy, making sure that I get everything published. Never have run a game, only have played in one campaign for less than a month. I'm not extremely impressed with the system. And I may never run a GURPS campaign.

But the reason it's my primary RPG system is the large number of licensed sourcebooks published by Steve Jackson Games. This has given me a focus for books to buy and read, and some of these series have been great, like Wild Cards, Chtorr, Uplift, and Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Witch World I haven't liked, and Conan I feel will be much the same. But overall, it's given me the excuse to read more than just BattleTech and Star Trek books. And that's one reason I like GURPS.