Kian Ryan rated Ender's Game: 3 stars
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (Ender's Saga, #1)
Ender's Game is a 1985 military science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card. Set at an unspecified date …
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Ender's Game is a 1985 military science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card. Set at an unspecified date …
The first of William Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy, Neuromancer is the classic cyberpunk novel.
German version, translated by Reinhard Heinz.
More …
The Long War is a science fiction novel by British writers Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. It is a sequel …
David Brin: “Startide Rising” (1983) This is a sci fi story about a Terran (Earth) crew of neo-dolphins and humans …
As a child of the 80s, and a learner of the 90s, I grew up in an exciting era in personal computing. I literally cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum, and then after learning how that worked inside and out, as a family we eventually upgraded to an Escom IBM compatable PC. I started hacking BASIC programs when I was old enough to type and moved on to Pascal, Delphi and Visual Basic when I was in secondary up to Java, C# and more modern languages as time went on.
I've been in this industry a while. I know the struggles of the UK home computing industry, between Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry and the inevitable demise and arrival of Atari and Amiga. When we moved on to IBM PCs, I started to follow what was then the relatively mature industry, with Gates and Jobs as very prominent …
As a child of the 80s, and a learner of the 90s, I grew up in an exciting era in personal computing. I literally cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum, and then after learning how that worked inside and out, as a family we eventually upgraded to an Escom IBM compatable PC. I started hacking BASIC programs when I was old enough to type and moved on to Pascal, Delphi and Visual Basic when I was in secondary up to Java, C# and more modern languages as time went on.
I've been in this industry a while. I know the struggles of the UK home computing industry, between Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry and the inevitable demise and arrival of Atari and Amiga. When we moved on to IBM PCs, I started to follow what was then the relatively mature industry, with Gates and Jobs as very prominent icons.
Whilst all this was going on, I had very little idea of the early history of personal computing, the things that happened before the Z80 processor and Clive Sinclair's little black box. Fire In The Valley is a history of the personal computing from the MITS Altair through to the present day. I expected a dry history, a page by page presentation of facts and was pleasantly surprised by quite a compulsive page-turner giving a sense of real excitement to the early and developing industry.
Whilst Fire In The Valley claims to be a complete history of personal computing, it clearly thrives on the early years, with a distinctive focus on MITS, IMSAI, Processor Technology, Apple, the companies and cultures of the 1960s through to the 1990s. The late few chapters do focus on the rise of Windows, Apple and the post-PC era but the bulk of the book is on these early years.
The book is organised mostly around subjects rather than presenting a chronological history. Where one chapter will deal with the development of the computer manufacturing industry from the 1960s through to the mid 1970s you'll then find yourself cast back to the mid 1960s for a discussion of early computer publishing. Check the dates whilst you're reading to make sure you're when you think you are and you'll be fine.
I found this book surprisingly inspiring. It's full of stories of geeks starting out businesses with very little, mostly from their garage sheds. Some rise, some fell, and it was interesting to see how much hard graft went in to building these empires. As someone coming in to the IBM PC era during the 90s, it was very easy to see these people as having it all handed to them on a plate, where the realities were lots of late nights, dodgy deals, fallen ventures and near bankruptcy.
It's excellent reading, and really fills in the details for those of us working in the industry today.
A pleasure to read.
Try to come to the book with only the most basic of expectations. Come knowing (hopefully) that Redshirts are the basic expendable unit in the Star Trek universe. Bring your knowledge of tropes and poorly thought out plots and thingymagics, because they'll become essential reference material for this novel.
Then let it completely defy your expectations. Most Hugo winners have an air of grandeur about them. They set out to be morality tales, or epic space operas. This one doesn't. When I first started reading I couldn't work out why this would have won such a prestigious award. By the end I was in complete agreement. It's ease of humour and air of familiarity makes this one of the most accessible science fiction books I've read for a long time. Hell, I'd almost class this outside of the SF genre and closer to satire. Can a …
A pleasure to read.
Try to come to the book with only the most basic of expectations. Come knowing (hopefully) that Redshirts are the basic expendable unit in the Star Trek universe. Bring your knowledge of tropes and poorly thought out plots and thingymagics, because they'll become essential reference material for this novel.
Then let it completely defy your expectations. Most Hugo winners have an air of grandeur about them. They set out to be morality tales, or epic space operas. This one doesn't. When I first started reading I couldn't work out why this would have won such a prestigious award. By the end I was in complete agreement. It's ease of humour and air of familiarity makes this one of the most accessible science fiction books I've read for a long time. Hell, I'd almost class this outside of the SF genre and closer to satire. Can a novel be both? Definitely, but if taking away one label and leaving the other gives it a further reach, then I would be glad to see it in more hands.
Superb.
Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website: The Left Hand of Darkness …
Hindsight is 20/20, and the author's notes at the beginning act as an apology for the book to follow. There are a number of Le Guin's books that focus on exploring diametrically opposite viewpoints - The Dispossessed reached from ordered societies through to Anarchy, and The Left Hand of Darkness looks from traditional sexuality to bi-sexuality (as in the ownership of both sexes, rather than neither). A great idea for a novel, that's unfortunately bogged down with 1960s misogyny that constantly paints "female" qualities as distinctly inferior to their male counterpart, whether physio- or psychologically. Which is a shame, as the story is an excellent driver, exploring the efforts of one off-worlder to open up a new world to extra-planetary trade.
The short story "The Coming of Age In Karhide", which is added on to this edition, makes for a much more balanced view of gender, and a more enjoyable …
Hindsight is 20/20, and the author's notes at the beginning act as an apology for the book to follow. There are a number of Le Guin's books that focus on exploring diametrically opposite viewpoints - The Dispossessed reached from ordered societies through to Anarchy, and The Left Hand of Darkness looks from traditional sexuality to bi-sexuality (as in the ownership of both sexes, rather than neither). A great idea for a novel, that's unfortunately bogged down with 1960s misogyny that constantly paints "female" qualities as distinctly inferior to their male counterpart, whether physio- or psychologically. Which is a shame, as the story is an excellent driver, exploring the efforts of one off-worlder to open up a new world to extra-planetary trade.
The short story "The Coming of Age In Karhide", which is added on to this edition, makes for a much more balanced view of gender, and a more enjoyable read. This story explores a teen coming in to kemmer (fertility) for the first time and is an excellent exploration of teen anxiety in an excellent analogue to puberty. This was written in 1995 and makes me wonder what further work done in this universe today could also bring.
That said, I did enjoy the novel. Novels of this period need to be read with an understanding of the context in which they were written, as Le Guin reminisces at the beginning of the novel. She read as much as she could on gender before starting writing the novel, and admits her own shortcomings. It's worth reading, since the ideas are interesting, but the unintentional misogyny sticks out like a pair of tits on a female in kemmer.
More lighthearted than other recent pTerry novels, I didn't expect to enjoy this and was pleasantly surprised. May go on the pile of pTerry stories to revisit on rainy days.
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The seminal revenge novel, with themes of redemption and justice.
Wow, it's freakin' long. Took months to read all 117 chapters. Oddly though, pretty well paced. At no point was I bored with it, which is not something that can be said for novels of a significantly shorter length.
Understandable how this has never been well transferred to either the small or big screen. The intertwining plots and motivations are so multitudinous, that it requires a notebook just to keep track of all that's going on. Very much enjoyed the conclusion, care was taken to wrap up all the story lines and unlike many novels I've read recently, the ending is heart-warming.
Well worth the time. All of it.