Our story opens with the hero and his girlfriend being killed-which leads to them being sentenced to digital storage for a hundred years. In this brave world of the future death is a little less permanent than it is now. Unless someone burns your stack-then you get the Real Death. Altered Carbon is filled with future slang and it does a pretty good job of sliding in a ton of backstory about the many elite groups that have a hand in ruling the universe. The main gimmick is the digital downloading of consciousness upon death and how a rich person…
Category: book review
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
It’s always hit or miss with David Sedaris. His most brilliant work often involves his family and always involves some personal flaw. His worst work, which can be offensive, belligerent, and nausea inducing, usually involves his views on politics. I don’t mind David Sedaris having political views or hating conservative-I just don’t want to find these tirades grouped together with his more traditional humor and nostalgia pieces. Like Squirrel Seeks Chipmonk, I’d like it better if he wrote this stuff under another name and collected them in separate books, perhaps only available in Iran or North Korea and then…
For Whom The Bell Tolls
“Wipe the pap of your mother’s breast off thy lips and give me a hatful of that dirt,’ the man with his chin on the ground said. ‘No one of us will see the sun go down this night.” ― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls A tragic tale of woe and misfortune about an American who has been ordered to blow up a bridge. Over the course of about three days we watch and listen as Robert Jordan and a band of Spanish Rebels prepare themselves for the battle to come. Given the title, it should come as…
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Image you’re a Lit Major who has made a number of amazing and critical discoveries about the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust. Now image your disappointment at finding there is no real money to be made criticizing Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust. What do you do with all that damned research and all that time wasted reading the Iliad, the Sonnets, and Swann’s Way? Why you write a space opera, of course. Or so it seemed to me while I was wading through Dan Simmons Ilium. Ilium is a long book that is basically three novels morphed into one. Two…
Red Shirts
A group of low ranking officers on a star ship come to the shocking conclusion that going on away missions is often a death sentence. The odds of dying go up or down depending on how many of the senior officers are also on the away mission. Our hero is a new member of the crew-one Ensign Andrew Dahl, who discoveries a number of odd things about the Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. In addition to the high death rate for away missions, there is also the odd way that many problems are solved-by putting…
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
For an old fan of Robert A. Heinlein like myself, Old Man’s War feels like the Grand Master has come back to life. Here’s a story of grand space opera with lots of violence, sex, and just a hint of politics. The characters are both serious and silly, not unlike the snarky people who inhabit Heinlein’s universe. Old Man’s War is set in some distance future where mankind has spread across the galaxy and managed to go to war with just about everyone they meet. This means that they need a lot of soldiers to play cannon fodder on the…
Consider The Fork
We take the world we are born into for granted-we tend to accept that everything around us has always been around in some form or another-even when the world we were born into has changed, and continues to change, around us. Consider The Fork delves into the world of food preparation and consumption and how technology has changed our relationship to what we eat and how we eat it. Author Bee Wilson talks about such things as how to really roast meat, why silver isn’t a good material for chopsticks, and what the end of slave labor has to do…
Reading Lolita in Tehran
As a soulless Imperialist swine who believes in Capitalism and the rights of young women to wear t-shirts and jeans in public, I found Reading Lolita in Tehran an intriguing book. It tells the surprising story of Intellectuals living in Iran in the years after The Revolution. Odd, my only thoughts on the people who stayed in Iran after Ayatollah Khomeini took over was that they were all fundamentalist nutcases with no brains at all. At the very onset Azar Nafisi says that she changed names and combined characters in order to protect the people she talks about in her…
Brain Trust
Garth Sundem has a lot of fun talking to a bunch of scientists who seem to spend a good deal of time thinking about things that aren’t all that important. Among the topics covered are how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket, how to lose weight by eating 8 hours a day, and how to win a race by taking the best angle on the turns. As the subtitle suggests, we get advice from 93 top scientists-and since the book is only 250 pages thick, this means there is not a lot of in depth coverage of…
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I read The Diamond Age not too long ago and really liked it, so I thought I would read Snow Crash next. Like Diamond Age, Snow Crash is a hypercomplex story with many characters doing all kinds of odd things, often at the same time. It took me several tries to get all the way through Snow Crash. The general ebb and flow of the story is confusing, the super stylized world baffling, and the general idea that humans can adapt to such a rapidly changing reality, let alone thrive in it, is a tad hard to believe. But then,…