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defrog
Book reports! Yr cup runneth over!JUST FINISHED
Halting State by Charles Stross
In 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 STARTED
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
I’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?
RECENT TITLES
The Zap Gun by Philip K Dick
Dick’s take on the arms race, in which the world is strictly divided into West and East and each get their advanced weapons (which secretly don’t work) from designers who get the ideas from drug-induced trances. Which works out great until alien slaver ships show up. This is one of those PKD books where the ideas are better than the execution, with clunky dialogue and an underdeveloped subplot with a brilliantly written paranoid character.
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Debut novel from Morgan that’s a classic case of taking an existing genre (detective noir/thriller) and porting it into a sci-fi setting. It’s the 26th century, where humans basically exist as software stacks that can be installed (and reinstalled) into different bodies, which is the foundation for an interesting premise – a rich guy revived via download after allegedly committing suicide brings a former soldier out of “storage” and hires him to prove he was in fact murdered. Complex and occasionally confusing, but overall pretty convincing.
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
I don’t normally read books after seeing the film version first, but The Road was so good and this was the only other McCarthy book on the shelves. I was knocked out by how faithful the Coens were to the book. As for the book itself, it’s a unique take on a not-so-original premise, and McCarthy makes it compelling reading (if you can get past his disdain for quotation marks).
The Brightonomicon by Robert Rankin
In which a teen narrator with memory loss is employed by Hugo Rune to solve 12 mysteries related to the Brighton Zodiac to recover a time-manipulation device before the villain of the story can use it to rule the world. Either a tribute to Sherlock Holmes or a dumping ground for short-story ideas, but either way it’s typical Rankin: goofy and fun.
Thunderbolts: Faith In Monsters by Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato Jr
I’ve never read Thunderbolts – the idea being that they’re former supervillains now working for the govt – but in the context of Marvel’s Civil War (which I’ve also never read), Ellis makes the most of the post-9/11 mentality and does a great job portraying Thunderbolts chief Norman Osborne as both quietly menacing and not a little insane. Good fun.
Money Shot by Christa Faust
Modern pulp noir about a former porn star running her own porn model agency who gets called out of retirement and ends up in the trunk of a Civic, raped, shot and left for dead. Sleuthing and revenge ensue. Grim and unpleasant, and not especially original or clever, but actually pretty well-written, and notable for actually portraying a balanced assessment of the porn biz (Faust having worked in it, though not hardcore) rather than resorting to the usual cliches.
Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E Westlake
Cheesy as it sounds, Westlake is someone I’ve never read much of but now that he’s dead, people recommend him, so I turned to this one about a cabbie who wins a long-shot horse racing bet but his bookie is killed before he can collect, and ends up the main suspect by the cops and two rival gangs. Interesting in that Westlake does a good job showing what happens when amateurs try to solve crimes, but I can’t say it made me an instant Westlake fan. I’ll probably try him again, though.
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