Reviews and Comments

Really wanted to enjoy it more, but the whole chapters where the nerd goes to space and gets it on with a hot astronaut lady were a bit distracting from the core of the book.

Does not feature anyone disappearing completely.

Might be a good read if you're between 23 and 27, are neither in college nor in a long-term job, -and- you think Michael Cera makes movies better by being in them.

Goodreads recommended this to me. Goodreads isn't very good at recommending things.

My relationship with horror writing is kind of marginal. I liked House of Leaves, China Mieville. Stuff with a little expansion to it.

This isn't it. The writing is not bad, it's just... mundane and cruel and depressing.

Weird little book in that the climax happens about six pages after the book starts, then the rest of the book just -goes- as characters hurtle towards inevitable destinations. It's like that scene in Back to the Future where Biff is thrown into a pile of dung, but stretched across 300 pages.

A Greg Egan novel lives or dies by how well it explores its concepts - I mean, you're not reading them for the wooden mannequins that no longer have simple emotions get on the way of their discussions of rational futurism.

This book kinda chokes on that. I mean, it's still better than Distress, and it shows the unique physics-distortion that's the crux of the book in an interesting way, but doesn't really GO places. I know that's the whole point, but still.

This is exactly like Quarantine except with somehow even less things happening. I guess the first chapter is interesting.

A series of horror stories with an unusual pattern - explanations never come tidily, protagonists rarely escape the traps building around them, karmic justice isn't enacted.

It's good. A bit too obsessed with the "body horror" of being merely old.

I just reread this book because I couldn't remember reading it. I can see why.

Raft and Flux are vastly better.

A detailed but kind of depressing scifi tale, as most Greg Egan stuff tends to be. The protagonists are immortal cyber-beings with the barest remains of animal desires, so the overwhelming theme is one of "well, what do we do now". And the final conclusion to that is one of the most disheartening things one could read in science fiction.

Would work better as a collection of short stories than what we have. The various storylines get confusing, and the most interesting aspect - the various non-human civilizations - have to be described from the view of passing humman protagonists rather than given some depth.

A good primer for anyone that wants to do game design beyond "an exact clone of World of Warcraft but I get to name the elves this time". Anthropy's laser-focus on a game as an exploration of a single mechanic may be a bit narrow, but it's a great stepping stone for a variety of game designs that doesn't get much love from the big companies.

Naomi Clark's second half focuses on storytelling and theme. It's a less revolutionary section, as pretty much every book on game design is a thinly rebranded essay on writing stories for books and movies, but it still details a lot of what makes storytelling for games unique.

But, most importantly, the book doesn't mention the hero's fucking journey anywhere, and so gets 5 out of 5.

First half of the book goes well. After that, characterization gets increasingly sketchy and inconsistent, plot points appear and just sit there without resolution, and the narrative focuses entirely on the nerdy male character because of course it does.

Pity the book blurb did not use the terms 'self-aware' and 'love letter to the genre' more often, so I'd know to stay away.