days of future passed
Nov. 29th, 2007 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ironymaideni mentioned The Atrocity Archives elsewhere in lj-land today. i mention it again because it is tasty and good, managing to merge the experience of the put-upon IT person with spycraft and Lovecraft. it's a clever and fun read.
it was the book that got me to try Charles Stross again. every time i encountered one of his short stories in a magazine, i hated it. they were all full to the brim with five-minutes-ago technobabble hyperbole. lame. it was like he was the radiation-damaged love child of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. (then again, perhaps this was all a knowing parody that flys right over my head. kind of like a modern audience trying to parse Armado in Love's Labour's Lost. feel free to explain it to me.)
we stayed at a hotel in Colorado that had a free books shelf. someone had added quite a bit of SF. there were several Stross books there (a fan, his publisher, him, dunno) so i finally picked up Accelerando, the award-winner.
aha. it's a collection of the stories i hated. i'm sure that they were better at their original publication date (Lobsters was published in 2001) but by 2007 their near-future has been curdled by reality, but yet not aged into the rich cheese of older near-futures that aren't. i tried valiantly to slog on, but found myself mostly marking passages to read aloud to C later. i like to listen to C laugh. i've passed it on to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sinthrex. perhaps he will enjoy it more.
i finished Halting State not too long ago. it's fun, and a nice extrapolation of where portable information technology could take us. (definitely recommended for you WoW fans.) it's already nearing its pull date, so if you have any interest, i would ingest it before it's a mass market paperback. (web 3.14159? describing someone as looking like a character from The Matrix? *eyeroll*)
(as a side note: i started out loving Merchant Princes, but the last two books have been boring middles. dude needs a stiff edit, or to stop spewing out pages and rewrite, or permission to print fatter books, or something. world=awesome. Miriam=awesome. Miriam doing nothing to further the plot=lame. also, where is my Paulie?)
it was the book that got me to try Charles Stross again. every time i encountered one of his short stories in a magazine, i hated it. they were all full to the brim with five-minutes-ago technobabble hyperbole. lame. it was like he was the radiation-damaged love child of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. (then again, perhaps this was all a knowing parody that flys right over my head. kind of like a modern audience trying to parse Armado in Love's Labour's Lost. feel free to explain it to me.)
we stayed at a hotel in Colorado that had a free books shelf. someone had added quite a bit of SF. there were several Stross books there (a fan, his publisher, him, dunno) so i finally picked up Accelerando, the award-winner.
aha. it's a collection of the stories i hated. i'm sure that they were better at their original publication date (Lobsters was published in 2001) but by 2007 their near-future has been curdled by reality, but yet not aged into the rich cheese of older near-futures that aren't. i tried valiantly to slog on, but found myself mostly marking passages to read aloud to C later. i like to listen to C laugh. i've passed it on to
sinthrex. perhaps he will enjoy it more.i finished Halting State not too long ago. it's fun, and a nice extrapolation of where portable information technology could take us. (definitely recommended for you WoW fans.) it's already nearing its pull date, so if you have any interest, i would ingest it before it's a mass market paperback. (web 3.14159? describing someone as looking like a character from The Matrix? *eyeroll*)
(as a side note: i started out loving Merchant Princes, but the last two books have been boring middles. dude needs a stiff edit, or to stop spewing out pages and rewrite, or permission to print fatter books, or something. world=awesome. Miriam=awesome. Miriam doing nothing to further the plot=lame. also, where is my Paulie?)
