FixedR6 at Fulltime Casual has made his feelings on the upcoming film adaptation of Neuromancer well felt and I am disheartened myself (though I suppose I will have to see it no matter how badly it is done).
This is just a continuation of many movies that I will still have to see despite knowing I will be disappointed including the Star Wars prequels and the latest Indiana Jones. Ok so it’s not a long list but you get what I mean. It’s the phenomenon of knowing you are going to have to go look at a train wreck of a film because you have always dreamed they would make the film and now that you’re presented with reality, the dream has taken on a less than perfect aspect.
I read Neuromancer in 2000 when I was on our big trip to the US (that we regrettably spent our home deposit on in one of those “life’s too short” moments not realising that housing prices were about to go through the roof and we could have saved for three holidays with what we had to raise in order to buy a house eight years later but I digress). Our friend’s boyfriend was with me when I went into a shop to grab something for the train ride from Boston to New York and he said “have you read Neuromancer? You’d really like it, it’s got this hot ninja chick in it”. So of course I picked it up and then wanted to stay extra time on the busses, trains and planes for the rest of the trip so I could keep reading it. I seem to remember being in Toronto just refusing to leave the hostel because “Toronto’s boring anyway”.
Neuromancer blew my mind. It’s kind of about having your mind blown anyway. It’s got dystopian future, mega corporations, cyberspace, and loads of impressive culture which is so alien yet so believable (I mean who would have thought of rastafarians in space?) and it’s prophetic as well (don’t forget it was written in 1984 or sometime about then).
So that was the beginning of my adult love of science fiction which I hadn’t exactly abandoned from childhood so much as lacked a bridge due to just not knowing anyone who could help me find the good stuff beyond what had been in my High School library. Fortunately around the same time, I became friends with my science fiction guru / mentor Nick who fed me a steady diet of Ken Macleod and Neal Stephenson until I could emerge from the nest and find my own way around the shelves of Pulp Fiction (the most bestest ever scifi / fantasy / mystery bookshop in Queensland at least who don’t have a fricking website for some reason).
So Neuromancer has a special place in my heart and if you haven’t read it then you should go and do so before I release some kind of visual virus that hacks your brain and turns you into a drooling reptilian brained zombie. No wait, that was Snow Crash but that’s another story.
Check out my book collection on librarything: see djfoobarmatt
[tags]books, movies, neuromancer, scifi, william gibson[/tags]
books, movies
I finished reading The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross the other night so here’s my usual half baked spoilerific review:
The Atrocity Archives is like James Bond meets Yes Minister meets Shaun of the Dead. We join Bob Howard, a trainee field agent working for “The Laundry” as he battles zombies, tentacled monsters with a taste for brainz, demon possessed Nazi’s from outer space and accidental discoveries in computational number theory. Oh and he also has to brave the admin and accounting department as well trying to avoid being noticed by a spooky upper management ex-field agent legend with vampirish vibes.
I liked this book. It was funny, clever, engaging, fast paced and charming. The main character, Bob Howard is likeable, cheeky, aware of irony and balls-y.
I’m just trying to think of anything I didn’t like about the book and I’m coming up short. But don’t take my word for it. You can get a taste of what the book is like by feasting your browser upon the exciting (no really) new Tor website and downloading Down on the Farm which is a short Bob Howard adventure. (note that part way down the page on the left is menu from which you can download the pdf version and an audio version. Thanks Tor!!)
P.S. Checkout my library on librarything
[tags]bob howard, book review, charles stross, the atrocity archives[/tags]
books
books, charles stross
I finished reading The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod the other day so here’s my usual half baked review.
Overall I enjoyed this book set in a slightly alternative near future on the brink of World War III. In this version of recent history, there have been several terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 which have changed the world creating a paranoid surveillance state in the UK (the book is set in the UK BTW)
The two protagonists are caught up in a series of events that various government groups are trying to ‘handle’ but even they are not sure who is doing what to whom and why. By the end of the book I think I understand what happened.
Some good things about this book: The state paranoia and disinformation poisoning of online discussion is scary because it’s so believable. The use of terrorists as scape-goats is scarily real (i.e. the terrorists do bad things but then the government is able to blame everything on them). The execution channel itself is sinister and does a good job of scaring the willies out of the reader as well as the characters in the book. I also liked how the action is not over the top. At no point do the protagonists whip out semi-automatic weapons and start blasting the good but mis-guided cops and blowing up spooks in their black vans. There is action but it is done in such a way as to just create tension. In fact the overall characteristic of this book is the maintained sense of paranoia and near peril. One last good point was that the lessor characters such as the conspiracy theory blogger and disinformation cell were interesting and I wanted to follow them more (I hope they show up again in later books)
Some bad things: The conclusion of the overall plot was just too audacious to suit the rest of the book for me. I knew it would be something big but when the reveal came I almost laughed at the silliness of it. If the book had been kind of silly the whole way along I would be saying that it was totally awesome but in this case it fell flat. But thinking about it now I can see suddenly why it had to be that ending but I don’t want to say more in case I spoil it for people who have read Ken’s other futuristic books. My advice to Ken is that when he does the re-release of this book he should have at least one character on the other side so that we get a better idea of the magnitude of what is going to happen before it happens.
But overall, a rocking book that marks a change of direction for Mr Macleod of whom I remain a great fan. Next cab off the rank in my semester break book binge is The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross.
[tags]book review, ken macleod, science fiction, the execution channel[/tags]
books
books, ken macleod, scifi
Last night I finished reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. I had gone into Pulp Fiction last week to grab Little Brother but they had sold out so I thought I’d get an idea of Doctorow’s style in this book. (Actually if I had been so inclined, I could have just downloaded the book from his website for free as he seems to release all his books this way)
With this book I was expecting a fairly straightforward urban tech novel maybe similar to what William Gibson has been writing lately which is just a totally wrong assumption. Doctorow’s style in this novel is possibly more of an experimental partial post-modern deconstruction or something. Or maybe it’s allegorical, I don’t know. The book has a fairly straightforward plot if your exclude the main character. It’s about a share house and a neighbourhood wireless mesh starting up. Then this weird main character is dropped into it who seems to have stepped out of a badly remembered dream. As the story progresses, even more weirdness is revealed. But somehow the story is really compelling and I had to keep reading just to see if any of it was going to be explained. I was pretty happy with the ending and might have enjoyed the book more had I known beforehand that it was going to be pretty weird.
[tags]science fiction, cory doctorow, books[/tags]
books
books, cory doctorow, scifi
I’ve just listened to the latest ‘Metacast’ address from Steve Eley of Escape Pod. I’ve been a fan of Escape Pod for a couple of years now and keep meaning to blog about it but because I often listen to them in the car, I usually forget by the time I get home. Probably the highlight for me was episode 100 when they (the Escape Pod volunteer reader team) did Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall. But there have been many many other stories by authors I’ve never heard of that have really inspired me (just ask Steph how much I bore her about some of the stories).
Escape Pod has some off-shoot projects in other genres as well: there is pseudopod the horror podcast and podcastle the fantasy podcast.
The thing that’s finally gotten me to blog about Escape Pod is that Steve has just disclosed on his podcast that he has gone through a very rough time with his job and relationships and that escape pod has been one of the rocks in his life. On hearing this, I thought it would be a good time to show my support for his podcast for all of the joy that it brings me. So Steve if you’re doing a google ego search and come across this: thanks for keeping it going and I’m glad things are looking up now. Oh yeah: and have fun!
As for you dear readers: go forth and download a few episodes right now!
Science, books
Good news lovers of books and reading this week. First I was checking out Google Books and thinking that was pretty neat. Then today I see that LibraryThing have integrated a little bit with Google Books
So now you can browse my LibraryThing library and if you see a book that looks interesting you can click on it’s title, check out all the LibraryThing social data (like reviews, similar books and user ratings) and then click “Google Books: Book info” over in the right hand sidebar and actually read an excerpt of the book online. Sadly a lot of my sci-fi books aren’t scanned in Google Books yet.
books
I finished reading Brasyl by Ian Macdonald a few weeks back and have been meaning to scrape together a bit of a review. The first book I read of Ian’s was River of Gods which was totally awesome. That made me buy The Ares Express which was ok but not as good.
When I saw the cover of Brasyl I thought it would be a lot more like River of Gods so I got pretty excited about it. However, I found Brasyl a lot harder to get into than River of Gods and I suspect part of the reason is having never travelled to Brasil or anywhere in South America so maybe I didn’t get it as much as reading River of Gods having done a few stints in India for work.
Like River of Gods, Brasyl is set (at least partly) in the near future – about fifty years from now. However it also has storylines in the present day and in the past that inevitably link up (but I won’t say how).
Where River of Gods focussed much of it’s attention on AIs and singularity, Brasyl looks at Quantum computing. While books about singularities and highly powerful AIs seem to crowd my bookshelves, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that does the quantum computing thing so to me Brasyl is ground breaking in this realm and I must say it totally blew my mind.
For some reason I didn’t develop any feelings for the characters in this book, their lives just seemed so alien to me. I had the most resonance with the 18th century Jesuit and his unlikely friendship with the French scientist, possibly because I related to the familiar subject matter of science versus religion in their dialog. The other characters: the shady “grey market” businessman and the reality TV producer were funny and wacky but I didn’t really care what happened to them (ok well I guess I wanted them to live so that’s something).
I think the setting of the book would be much more appreciated by someone who has been to a country like Brasil. There were lots of Spanish (or Portugese?) terms used in the book which took awhile to get a feel for and also it was hard for me to imagine what it all looked like.
Gadget spoilers: As far as gadgets go (and don’t we all read scifi for the gadgets?), the weapon of choice was the quantum blade (similar to the one in Johnny Mnemonic only more like a dagger). It popped up in some unusual places and provided a strong level of menace (as well as carnage). The iShades were a pretty cool accessory – like an iPhone in your sunglasses I guess and our favorite bugs RFIDs had been taken to the next level with satellite tracking. The two quantum computers seemed pretty large, needing a whole room of equipment and they had blue LEDs which are so hot right now. The tech was not neglected in the 18th century end of things with the invention of wooden cannons and the use of … actually I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot so I’ll just say that Clarke’s law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic comes into play.
[tags]book review, Brasyl, Ian Macdonald, science fiction[/tags]
books
I’m currently reading Spook Country by William Gibson. Suddenly everything around me has become a metaphor for nineteenth century optimism sneered at through a lens of post modern dystopian cynicism.
Someone needs to write the William Gibson metaphor generator.
[tags]books, William Gibson, metaphors, the sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel[/tags]
books
I’ll make this review short so it’ll be easy for you. Go and get this book and read it. It’s awesome.
Want to know more? Well there’s this blogger in the far future who’s grown up on a world that is actually a giant space ship which has been traveling for thousands of years and has found a planet inhabited by intelligent giant bat people. Are you on your way to the bookshop yet?
Ok get this: the bat people are at that stage where humans were at just before The Great War. So the humans from outer-space have a problem because they don’t want to accidentally start a war right? So they have to be careful but they have all their own politics and economy and stuff to worry about.
The kind of book you feel really disappointed about finishing because you want to just keep learning the world.
I have no financial interest in this book BTW. I just liked it.
books
It seems like every book and movie I see lately is about alternative realities – the illusion that is life etc… I interrupted my reading of Glasshouse in order to chomp through Harry Potter and returned to finish it this week.
How can I explain this book? It’s like the future but they are simulating the past so it’s set in the modern day but it’s all slightly wrong and warped because in the future, they have forgotten most of what it was like to live now. Little things like how you have to stay in the one body for your whole life and can’t just assemble any body you feel like, e.g. one with four arms. Little things like how we have money and an economy etc… Little things like gender. Little things like death.
So the book is about all those things. It’s about sociology and social engineering. The protagonist Robin is a recent outpatient of a memory erasure clinic, he/she/it volunteers to be a part of a study that is simulating 20th century life in order to try and understand what it was like. But all is not what it seems. And Robin is not who he seems either!
I enjoyed this book for it’s originality but found that I couldn’t get very attached to the characters. Part of this was on purpose to highlight the alien-ness of the post-human characters as they tried to come to terms with everyday life. It’s like a reversal of most science fiction – instead of the ordinary going into some fantastic world, it was the fantastic world having an adventure in what is ordinary to us. Reminiscent of the Star Trek movie where the Enterprise travels to the 20th century to borrow a whale.
Probably one of the funniest bits is where one of the characters recommends that every dad should be the mother of their children for the first few years: literally. (think about it: they live in a world where they can change bodies on a whim)
If you feel like reading a book that is like Happy Days with a bit of Total Recall then this is for you.
books
