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One of these books took two months to read. So yr lucky yr getting more than one review, is what I’m saying.
Fall or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I read a lot of Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk heyday when he was coining terms like the metaverse and whatnot. I mostly stopped reading him when he shifted to doorstop historical fiction, and from there to doorstop SF, mainly because his novels were close to a thousand pages a pop, which was kind of intimidating. On the other hand, I did enjoy Anathem, so when I came across this at a bargain price, I decided to give it a shot. It’s a sequel of sorts to Reamde (which I haven’t read), but it works as a standalone.
The basic story follows Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, a billionaire techie who, before his sudden death at the start of the book, had declared in his will that his brain be frozen, scanned and revived if the technology exists. As it happens, a company run by his rival Elmo Shepard is developing a way to scan the brain into a digital connectome. His grandniece Sophia eventually activates Dodge’s connectome – and then things get weird as Dodge’s brain (which identifies as Egdod) starts constructing a virtual world to live in, which develops over time into a digital afterlife called Bitworld that people in the real world can watch online. Part of the conflict in the book revolves around whether a digital afterlife should be a duplicate of this one or something post-human (and thus presumably utopian). Which is interesting – except that Stephenson uses this as an excuse to write a digitalized version of Paradise Lost, which then morphs into a fantasy quest novel.
For me, the Bitworld parts were the least interesting, though Stephenson’s overall theme is well taken. The far more interesting aspects were the real-world parts, which describe a reasonably realistic account of how the SF trope of uploading brains to the cloud might actually work. Also, the section early on where an internet hoax involving a terrorist attack ends up dividing America into paranoid alt-reality factions seems almost prophetic, given events since its publication in 2019. Anyway, I learned a lot, given Stephenson’s propensity for breezy infodump tangents, but I also spend half the book flipping impatiently through the pages. Which is of course my problem, not Stephenson's.
Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my second time reading Keigo Higashino, after reading The Devotion of Suspect X some years ago. This is the fourth instalment of the Detective Galileo series, and the second to be translated into English, although like with any decent mystery series, the running order doesn’t matter. This one is a slight variation on the formula of The Devotion Of Suspect X: we know early on who the killer is, Police Detective Kusanagi and Junior Detective Kaoru Utsumi hit one dead end after another, and eventually it’s up to physicist and occasional police consultant Yukawa (a.k.a. Detective Galileo) to help figure out the crime, although this time it’s Utsumi who brings him into the case.
This time, the case involves Yoshitaka Mashiba, who dies while drinking coffee at his home alone. Kusanagi and Utsumi discover quickly that the coffee was poisoned, and the obvious suspect is his wife Ayane, whom he is about to divorce – only she was hundreds of miles away visiting her family at the time. Kusanagi thinks this clears her, but Utsumi isn’t convinced, and thinks Kusanagi isn’t being objective in his feelings towards Ayane. But with Ayane having a solid alibi, if she is the killer, how did she do it? And if she really didn’t, who did? That’s where Yukawa comes in. But the more they dig into the case, the more it seems like an impossible murder – “the perfect crime”, as they say.
For all the raves about The Devotion Of Suspect X (which I liked), I found that I liked this one somewhat more. With DoSX, there’s no doubt who the killer is. Here, even though the killer is IDed in the first chapter, Higashino is more ambiguous about it. So as the case unfolds, there’s genuine suspense not only in terms of how the crime was committed, but whether the character we’re pretty sure did it really did do it, so it’s an engaging page turner. The actual method of murder (like with lots of Japanese murder mysteries) is complex enough to require some suspension of disbelief, but points for originality, anyway.
View all my reviews
Smooth criminal,
This is dF
Fall or, Dodge in Hell by Neal StephensonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I read a lot of Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk heyday when he was coining terms like the metaverse and whatnot. I mostly stopped reading him when he shifted to doorstop historical fiction, and from there to doorstop SF, mainly because his novels were close to a thousand pages a pop, which was kind of intimidating. On the other hand, I did enjoy Anathem, so when I came across this at a bargain price, I decided to give it a shot. It’s a sequel of sorts to Reamde (which I haven’t read), but it works as a standalone.
The basic story follows Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, a billionaire techie who, before his sudden death at the start of the book, had declared in his will that his brain be frozen, scanned and revived if the technology exists. As it happens, a company run by his rival Elmo Shepard is developing a way to scan the brain into a digital connectome. His grandniece Sophia eventually activates Dodge’s connectome – and then things get weird as Dodge’s brain (which identifies as Egdod) starts constructing a virtual world to live in, which develops over time into a digital afterlife called Bitworld that people in the real world can watch online. Part of the conflict in the book revolves around whether a digital afterlife should be a duplicate of this one or something post-human (and thus presumably utopian). Which is interesting – except that Stephenson uses this as an excuse to write a digitalized version of Paradise Lost, which then morphs into a fantasy quest novel.
For me, the Bitworld parts were the least interesting, though Stephenson’s overall theme is well taken. The far more interesting aspects were the real-world parts, which describe a reasonably realistic account of how the SF trope of uploading brains to the cloud might actually work. Also, the section early on where an internet hoax involving a terrorist attack ends up dividing America into paranoid alt-reality factions seems almost prophetic, given events since its publication in 2019. Anyway, I learned a lot, given Stephenson’s propensity for breezy infodump tangents, but I also spend half the book flipping impatiently through the pages. Which is of course my problem, not Stephenson's.
Salvation of a Saint by Keigo HigashinoMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my second time reading Keigo Higashino, after reading The Devotion of Suspect X some years ago. This is the fourth instalment of the Detective Galileo series, and the second to be translated into English, although like with any decent mystery series, the running order doesn’t matter. This one is a slight variation on the formula of The Devotion Of Suspect X: we know early on who the killer is, Police Detective Kusanagi and Junior Detective Kaoru Utsumi hit one dead end after another, and eventually it’s up to physicist and occasional police consultant Yukawa (a.k.a. Detective Galileo) to help figure out the crime, although this time it’s Utsumi who brings him into the case.
This time, the case involves Yoshitaka Mashiba, who dies while drinking coffee at his home alone. Kusanagi and Utsumi discover quickly that the coffee was poisoned, and the obvious suspect is his wife Ayane, whom he is about to divorce – only she was hundreds of miles away visiting her family at the time. Kusanagi thinks this clears her, but Utsumi isn’t convinced, and thinks Kusanagi isn’t being objective in his feelings towards Ayane. But with Ayane having a solid alibi, if she is the killer, how did she do it? And if she really didn’t, who did? That’s where Yukawa comes in. But the more they dig into the case, the more it seems like an impossible murder – “the perfect crime”, as they say.
For all the raves about The Devotion Of Suspect X (which I liked), I found that I liked this one somewhat more. With DoSX, there’s no doubt who the killer is. Here, even though the killer is IDed in the first chapter, Higashino is more ambiguous about it. So as the case unfolds, there’s genuine suspense not only in terms of how the crime was committed, but whether the character we’re pretty sure did it really did do it, so it’s an engaging page turner. The actual method of murder (like with lots of Japanese murder mysteries) is complex enough to require some suspension of disbelief, but points for originality, anyway.
View all my reviews
Smooth criminal,
This is dF
