Kicking off the year with an intense sci fi exploration of language and Language! Embassytown is a human colony/outpost on a distant planet Arieka—accessible only by a dangerous trip through some timey-wimey wishy-washy-space-travel stuff called the immer. The Ariekei live on Arieka and they communicate with Language: They can only speak literally, with a dual mouth that speaks in unison, and their intent must be known and match the words, or it has no meaning. They cannot lie; they cannot understand human language. So to speak with any creativity, […]
Lost Between a Doctor and a Towel
For some, Douglas Adams is just the guy who wrote that weird book about towels, the Universe and everything else, but a few might know him for what he really is: a great sci-fi writer, working on several episodes of Doctor Who and, of course, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In Dirk Gently, we get to see, as described by the author “a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics”. It basicly sums up the idea behind the plot that […]
Theories of Flight: The Metrozone Series, Book 2
The first book in this series, Equations of Life, left us with young super genius mathematician Samuil Petrovitch standing in the ruins of what had been London after taking in millions of refugees from an international nuclear disaster. While the city had been virtually destroyed by an AI, Theories of Flight finds Petrovitch in a slightly better place overall. He has invented an anti-gravity generator that makes him world famous; he ends up having married the nun-warrior he had met in the first book, and […]
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
This was a very interesting concept that was hampered by unsympathetic protagonists and, heightened for me since I listened to the audio book, excruciatingly dialog. Everything was ‘meg brag’ or ‘like, da da da’ and they referred to each other as ‘Unit.’ The language made sense since this was basically Idiocracy with better technology but it was just painful to listen to what our world is realistically devolving into… Titus in an upper middle class kid who goes to the Moon on vacation with his friends during Spring […]
This will look good on my trophy necklace.
“The Secretary of Defense stood at the front of the room giving the most important PowerPoint presentation in human history. […] The fate of all mankind rested on the decisions that would be made in this room in the next few minutes, so of course PowerPoint wasn’t working. […] ‘It doesn’t really matter which dimension you’re in Mr. President, Windows still does that. There’s even one Earth where Bill Gates’s cyborg head is God Emperor and they’re still forced to use Vista.’ ” In a […]
Business is Business
I was planning on saving Lock In for another time, but after listening to The Dispatcher, I needed to listen to Lock In. I listened to the Wil Wheaton narration. Listening to Wheaton’s narration made me think of Armada, which I had just listened to him narrate. Very briefly, the title of this review was “That’s how you do nostalgia, Cline!” I changed it because that would have been unfair to John Scalzi, Ernst Cline and their respective books. Just so you know, though, Scalzi […]
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