Obsolete Your Idols

I read another Apex book, this one called Hebrewpunk.  It’s a collection of stories and if I had to pick one word to describe this collection as a whole, it would be ‘underripe’.  Not to say these are bad stories, they’re not.  But some of them feel undercooked and some of them feel like they’re the wrong part of the life of the protagonist of the story.

The collection starts off with a heist story named, of course, The Heist.  It has a reasonably engaging though not very detailed criminal undertaking in some fantastical near future setting.  This sounds like the opening adventure to someone’s Shadowrun campaign.  It ends with a bang but not one I found very satisfying, not enough context for me to even understand the ramifications of the crime, the patron, the protector, any of that.

The other three stories in the collection are individual tales of the three criminals from the first story, taking place in their personal pasts.  These are more interesting than the first tale but for my money, the last story is the best, perhaps because of the strength of the source material used.  That tale, The Dope Fiend, calls out a book used as reference and I’m intrigued enough I’ve wishlisted that book.

It’s called Dope Girls and I think it probably factored into the Hand of Glory storyline from The Invisibles.

I’m not sorry I read this collection, but I think I’d rather have read a later Lavie Tidhar collection.

In the meantime, here’s a sad trombone.

Facebook applications I have removed today

• Causes
• Define Me
• Knighthood
• Likeness
• Nazar Boncu?u
• Northwest Trail
• Send Good Karma
• Timezones
• Traveler IQ Challenge

In some cases the application simply fails to work with my operating system and browser often enough that it’s not fun and in other cases I just never found myself playing with it.  Having them there in my profile felt like a mild burden that I can opt out of so I am.