Read about 2/3s of the way, at which point I just got... bored of the whole thing? I dunno what I was expecting, I was never that big a Gibson fan in the first place.
EDIT: ok, powered through. If you like getting into an alt-future with no introduction to the world or terminology, William Gibson does it twice.
features all the Gibson favorites: messy bedrooms, custom-made tech, fancy clothing/body mods, reality show stars AND corporate takeovers.
Reviews and Comments
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zaratustra rated Mad Mazes: 5 stars
zaratustra rated The Sandman - Overture: 4 stars
The Sandman - Overture by Neil Gaiman
Presents the Sandman's origin story from the birth of a galaxy to the moment that Morpheus is captured.
zaratustra reviewed The Peripheral by William Gibson
Depending on her veteran brother's benefits in a city where jobs outside the drug trade …
Review of 'The Peripheral' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
zaratustra reviewed Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop (Penguin science)
Review of 'Complexity' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
The story of the founding of the Santa Fe institute, and interviews with the various very smart people that founded it, their ideas about systems and complexity and how they're not like the other economists, no no, they understand humans are complicated and that's why you need lots of numbers instead of few numbers.
The book has some technical detail but not much; it's very much a layman's book, and it's very good in that regard. It gives a good primer on the various root ideas in complexity theory and emergence. What may be useful to an academic are the interviews; this is as close as you get, in regards to understanding the reasoning behind the research of these professors, without actually attending a lecture.
zaratustra reviewed Eating the dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
Review of 'Eating the dinosaur' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A surprisingly good series of essays on fame and the nature of sports. Though, it kind of falters on the later essays when it tries to analyze "people" as a whole.
zaratustra reviewed Rule 34 by Charles Stross
Review of 'Rule 34' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Ehhhh. It's a crime novel except IN THE FUTURE OMG. It's not even WEIRD crimes like the cover claims.
zaratustra reviewed Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
Microserfs is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form …
Review of 'Microserfs' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I liked the remake of this novel (jPod) better.
zaratustra rated 250 indie games you must play: 5 stars
zaratustra rated Armada: 2 stars
Armada by Ernest Cline
Armada is a science fiction novel by Ernest Cline, published on July 14, 2015 by Crown Publishing Group (a division …
zaratustra reviewed The Nature of Order by Delete me
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of …
Review of 'The Nature of Order' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
At first I found this to be some infuriatingly vague verbiage in the same vein as The Secret, except instead of "good things happen if you think about them", the key phrase is "Everything is connected".
Then it hit me and now I'm impressed. This man has written a 500-page treatise on how he hates modern architecture. The exact line is somewhere in 1940, but halfway through the book, I could tell whether the dude liked or hated something purely based on when it was made.
Of course, he never uses the terms 'like' or 'hate'. He says these buildings lack 'life', but once you use the word 'life' to describe a quality, your bias is pretty well estabilished, isn't it? You're not going to tell someone their face lacks life and expect anything but your face to have more punches in it.
The author goes on to describe a …
At first I found this to be some infuriatingly vague verbiage in the same vein as The Secret, except instead of "good things happen if you think about them", the key phrase is "Everything is connected".
Then it hit me and now I'm impressed. This man has written a 500-page treatise on how he hates modern architecture. The exact line is somewhere in 1940, but halfway through the book, I could tell whether the dude liked or hated something purely based on when it was made.
Of course, he never uses the terms 'like' or 'hate'. He says these buildings lack 'life', but once you use the word 'life' to describe a quality, your bias is pretty well estabilished, isn't it? You're not going to tell someone their face lacks life and expect anything but your face to have more punches in it.
The author goes on to describe a list of loose rules that, when applied, will create 'life' in any architectural or otherwise endeavour you choose to pursue. Prepare for wonderful pearls of wisdom such as "Everything is composed by centers that are defined by their relationship to other centers".
If you really want to never design anything modern again, or if you're the sort of person that likes couching their ideas on generalized wise-sounding vagueness to sound like a genius, this is the book for you.
zaratustra reviewed Ra by qntm
Review of 'Ra' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
It starts well enough - what if magic worked like programming? That's a cool idea. What if there was a parallel world that you entered by dreaming and where thoughts coexisted with thinkers? Nice. What if there was a wizard that lived in the dream world but also in the real world and also he has super-magic powers? OK. What if there was a cabal that had super-SUPER-magic powers and was hiding it from everyone? Uh. What if all that was a lie and the cabal was actually protecting humanity except not really and then it's a million years in the future and everything is a simulation by space wizards that can do super-super-SUPER-magic and we have real computers imitating fake computers imitating real computers and
zaratustra rated I'll mature when I'm dead: 3 stars
I'll mature when I'm dead by Dave Barry
In this brilliantly funny exploration of the treacherous state of adulthood by the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist, Barry tackles everything from …
zaratustra reviewed The sugar frosted nutsack by Mark Leyner
Modern gods and goddesses wreak havoc on an unemployed butcher from New Jersey.
Review of 'The sugar frosted nutsack' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
"Although this is all self-serving and unsubstantial bullshit, it is upscale, artisanal self-serving bullshit of the highest order."
An entry in a genre that did not exist, and probably should not exist: the gonzo saga.
zaratustra reviewed The Arrows of Time by Greg Egan
Review of 'The Arrows of Time' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Has a nice scene where the inhabitants of the non-oriented space-time find themselves in a world that's running on the opposite direction timewise. But in general spends way too long discussing political squabbles that might as well be in a regular politics book for regular politics people.