It’s a small scale picaresque of a lovable loser who is driven from scene to scene by the actions of others until he has finally had enough and then his will drives him from scene to scene.  There’s quite a bit to like in this book, from a naked bitch goddess to a cautious and thoughtful tribe chief, from a cannibal to a fruitbat.  This is a fun, fast-paced romp which even has a couple sex scenes, neither one with much romance to it.

Things I liked about this book

• good pacing, chapters weren’t any longer than they needed to be
• a naked drunk petty goddess
• the presentation of an exotic location
• a Brooklyn descended post-mortal protector

Who might like this book

• people who think that Tim Powers is too serious when he writes about spooky cults
• people who’ve always wondered what happens to people who cross Texas matrons
• fans of pilots
• fans of cannibals

Who might not like this book

• men with castration anxiety
• sharks
• strict realists who are looking for a wholesome morally uplifting snore-fest


#!/bin/bash

echo Indexing $2 as level $1/$3
if [ ! -d by-start-level/$1 ];
then
mkdir by-start-level/$1
fi
cd by-start-level/$1
ln -s “../../$2″ ./$3
cd -

The effect I’m going for here is to end up with a symlink farm of files, indexed by minimum character level.  Pulling that out of the files themself is more work than I wanted to do, but it’s easy enough to open a file, eyeball grep out a number, and then call the script with the original name, character level and destination short name.  As a side-effect I can group otherwise unrelated files thematically.  So I can have a set of adventures designed for 5th level characters with a short handle of run_this_next-1, run_this_next-2 or use-these-maps-4 or whatever.

So I recently read Strange Itineraries, a collection of his short stories, including two collaborations with James Blaylock.

This collection is wonderful.  It’s a rising arc of strong writing, weird tales, drunken protagonists and unearthly encounters. Ghost stories galore, a nice time travel paradox story and California flavor.

Who might like this collection

• fans of Tim Powers novels
• fans of Americana ghost stories
• fans of Donnie Darko

Who might not like this collection

• people who enjoy the often long progression to the tipping point in a Tim Powers novel
• people who need every aspect of a story to make sense
• people who are sensitive to mentions of alcohol consumption

Pole-axed to discover he’s still playing.

I found it a frustrating book.  Other people told me it was frustrating to read but they were talking about the prose style which is somewhat experimental. The language and constructs were much more accessible than those of some writers I’ve enjoyed (Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, Michael Moorcock, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce) and not really an impedance.   The thing which frustrated me about this story is how obliquely the author tries to tell it.  It’s a story I could express to you in thirty words.

The one thing I would like to champion about this book is the future setting.  I do like the idea of a place and time where radical physical form changes are trivial, computation is no longer a scarce commodity for anyone, intersystem travel is rapid and virtual reality addiction commonplace.  All of that is a fun setting to read about for me.

But to have half of the characters consolidated, the grand design revealed to be a trick all along, and the implausible actions of the characters not given some kind of an explanation, left me looking for the rest of this story.  There are fun bits and funny bits and there are sad bits and moving bits in this book.  But on the whole I can’t say I liked it.

Who might like this book

• fans of space opera
• fans of experimental writing, more poem in places than prose
• fans of Brin’s Uplift stories who want something in that vein

Who might not like this book

• people who hate omnipotent alien tampering ala Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation
• people who hate unreliable narrators who won’t even justify their actions to themselves

More to the point, it’s a story about a group of people who disappear out in space but leave behind a functional ship.  Years later some personal items taken from that ship are going to be auctioned off and come into the possession of Alex Benedict, an antiquities dealer, and Chase Kolpath, his lovely assistant.  I gather there’s an earlier book by McDevitt with these two characters but I didn’t feel lost or very confused without having read it.  (There was a moment when a character, Jacob, is speaking and I didn’t realize yet that that’s the name of their house AI; just a tip if you find yourself similarly confused).

The two have a relationship a touch reminiscent of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin if Nero Wolfe were reticent and Archie Goodwin was a spicy spaceship pilot.  This story is like one of the Boy’s SF Adventure stories I read as a kid (YA Heinlein, say) if the active protagonist were female and the nominal male lead were distant and obsessive.  There’s plenty of science flavoring to this tale, with interesting futuristic technology and resourceful juryrigging by Chase.  There is a fair amount of macking on and by Chase but it didn’t divert from the narrative or diminish her capabilities.  Chase Kolpath is badass.  Alex Benedict is truly a fortunate employer.

In the end, I only had one qualm with the answer to the mystery and that is because I felt feinted without cause by one of the scenes along about chapter eighteen.  It seemed to me to undermine one of the needed pieces of the ending.  Even after a re-reading of that scene I still felt tricked, but I can forgive that because the whole rest of it hangs together so well.  You get to figure the mystery out along with the characters and it’s a joy to watch them do so.  This is one of the most solidly put together stories I’ve read in a long time.  Highly enjoyable, strong female protagonist, some nice scenes possible only in science fiction.

Who might like this book

• People who are looking for sf with more than bimbo females, flat-personality rugged-jawed mouthpieces-for-ideas males and hand wavey plot resolutions
• People who like tightly woven mystery plots
• People who are or are likely to become trapped in a decaying orbit with quasars

Who might not like this book

• People who like lurid future sex scenes
• People who think girls are dumb
• People who are sensitive about the money they spend on antiques

Despite the age it’s still pertinent to developing in C or C++ in the Linux environment.  It does a decent job of covering the core concepts of different kinds of resources used by processes including threads.  Many code examples make the nitty gritty manifest and it has pointers to even more resources, including a site dedicated to the book.

The target audience of this book is purportedly primarily Windows developers who have decided to develop on Linux.  Right.  Because that happens.  But as it turns out, this book is well targeted for rusty Unix developers and dabblers like myself.

Who might like this book

• C coders who have somehow mysteriously failed to use this ‘looooo-nix’ thing
• Linux system administrators who can shrug off their sick dependency on webmin long enough to look at a command line
• Someone wanting to read about the innards of the Linux environment

Who might not like this book

• Windows users.  It contains no Wizards, bluescreens

It’s the story of a future (the 2000 AD of the title) where the United States has gotten its act together enough to give (nearly) everyone a living wage though with it comes an almost total lack of privacy and a rather tightly yoked role in society.  That’s the surface, anyway.  Then, this being a Mack Reynolds book, we peel back layers, see some groovy people who are hip to the truth and clue in our protagonist.  This not being a Philip K. Dick story, the revelations don’t destroy the protagonist and all of the drug use is good clean fun used to enhance sex or being alive.

The payoff in this story is all in the Aftermath epilogue at the end but it’s a satisfying wrap on a relatively straightforward story.  Looking back on that future from eight years past it, I’m wistful for how bright the future looked from 1974.  The story is a curiosity and a pleasant read but probably not life changing.

People who might like this book

• Those with an appreciation for retro-futurism.
• Those who like to read politically oriented sf.
• Those looking for old ideas of what newness means

People who might not like this book

• Those who don’t like stereotypes of the early 1970s projected into the future.
• Those who trust implicitly the governors to govern wisely.
• Those who are anti-drug, anti-sex, anti-future, anti-fun.

delicious the movie

Originally uploaded by delicious blog

Well now! This is an interesting animation of how the site has changed. Fun to watch things flip around from old to new.