Well that’s unexpected. Epiphany is pretty cool… but she’s way too young for him. Still, demons, time travel, a succubus, demon blood transfusion slaves, a wedding or two? A good volume.
Well that’s unexpected. Epiphany is pretty cool… but she’s way too young for him. Still, demons, time travel, a succubus, demon blood transfusion slaves, a wedding or two? A good volume.
When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.
Murderbot is out on their own! It’s an interesting change of pace from the previous story, where Muderbot was still in the role of SecUnit… On the way, it runs into ART (a spaceship AI; not it’s real name, it stands for Asshole Research Transport; three guesses who that’s from…) who turns out to be a great ally. Muderbot gets a few changes to act slightly less SecUnit and more Augmented Human, goes back to the planet where to some extend it all began, and ends up hiring out it’s services as private security–hey, do what you know.
This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
What am I in for…
Overall, it’s an interesting read. In a nutshell, it builds up a model for ‘vehicles’ that start with a single wheel and basic sensor and grows, adding better senses and in particular a more and more complicated brain. I would have liked something a bit more technical and/or practical but there are a lot of interesting ideas here.
One downside, the wording is … a bit pretentious at times. Academic is probably a better word. Above is the first paragraph.. and that’s really how it stays.
Overall, an interesting enough and surprisingly quick read.
Well that’s an odd sort of book. It’s basically the story of the Fall of Satan plus Genesis, wrapped up in some crazy flowery poetry, writ long. It’s been on my ‘why not’ list for a long time and hearing more about it in Daemon Voices bumped it up a fair bit.
Am I glad to have read it? Yes. Is it a good book? Maybe. The poetry is absolutely beautiful in some places, but the story is one you’ve probably heard before, if you’ve any sort of judeo-christian upbringing, although it does embelish in spots. And oy does it get long. It thought there were 7 books for some reason, so when I finished number 7 and we’re barely into Genesis…, well, I knew I was wrong about that.
In any case, the first few books with the fall of Satan are very cool and I’d say worth reading. The rest, hit or miss.
An interesting collection. Constantine in India, looking for purity. Punk and the Conservatives. Nergal and Bast’s … cousin, maybe? And Papa Midnite backstory. A lot of leaning on the past, but neat stories.
Life is terrifying. None of us have a rule book. None of us know what we’re doing here. So, the easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it. If you believe you have control, then you believe you’re at the top. And if you’re at the top, then people who aren’t like you… well, they’ve got to be somewhere lower, right? Every species does this. Does it again and again and again. Doesn’t matter if they do it to themselves, or another species, or someone they created.
Oh. Wow. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet felt like lightning in a bottle. Something amazing–a look at the life in a long haul spaceship full of strange and wonderful characters–that I wasn’t sure how it could possibly be continued.
Turns out… just like this. This is a very very good sequel.
On one hand, A Closed and Common Orbit was a bit of a surprise. We only barely get any of the characters we know and love from the first book. There are a few hints of and references to them, but for the most part, we instead focus on Lovey/Sidra* and Pepper, learning once again how two very strange and different sorts of people can grow into a family. The same general idea, approached a totally different way.
Okay, I get what all the hype is about. Take a heavily armed cyborg/clone, designed entirely as muscle to defend the more squishy ’traditional’ humans, have it turn off the software constraining it from killing everyone, add in a wonderfully snarky sense of humor… and see what happens.
I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Some holiday cheer (nothing deep but they’re neat enough), a new girl gone very very wrong, and Chas getting to be the hero. A good volume.
Individual readalong reviews. Spoilers: