Book reports! Yr cup runneth over!
JUST FINISHEDHalting State by Charles StrossIn which Stross takes a crack at the virtual reality genre using today’s version of VR (i.e. Second Life, World of Warcraft, etc), and how it relates to the real world in the near future. To go into detail would be to give too much away, but suffice to say it starts with an IT company calling the cops to report that a bank within an online RPG has been robbed by Orcs. Then people start dying. Like a lot of Stross’ SF/techno work, you’ll need a few degrees in IT technology to understand half of what anyone’s saying (I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for my day job covering most of the technologies he describes), but beyond that, it’s a really clever take on where our Web 2.0 GPS-enabled world is headed. This may just be the
Neuromancer or
Snow Crash for the Millennium Generation. Credit also for pulling off the entire story in a second-person narrative (which normally irritates me, but makes sense here – it reminds me of those old text-based computer RPGs back in the late 80s, which was probably why Stross deployed it).
JUST STARTEDThe World Without Us by Alan WeismanI’m reading this primarily for research purposes for a potential NaNoWriMo project, but the premise is interesting in itself: if humans were to suddenly vanish off the face of the Earth for whatever reason, what would become of the cities and infrastructure left behind, and how long would it take for nature to reclaim what Progress took away?
( And there's plenty more where that came from ... )Paid in full,
This is dF
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
